Why Plant Cover Crops? The Basics

0:00 So we're all super excited to be running this webinar series today and kicking it off with a really important topic, which is why might you want to plant cover crops? There's a multitude of different problems that cover crops might be able to help solve on your farm or operation. It may be a bit overwhelming, maybe even intimidating to sift through those when you're just starting out. So over the next 30 minutes Keith is going to be giving us a bit of a presentation. We're going to have a bit of a conversation on why exactly might you want to plant cover crops and what does that look like when you're incorporating that into your other crop rotation.

0:41 So yeah, just go ahead and be thinking of your questions as we're going here and feel free to preload them in the chat box or the Q&A box and we'll be sure to get around to those at the end. We'll save 15 minutes at the end for Q&A and I'll just pass it over to Keith here and we'll go ahead and get started.

1:03 Okay, thank you, Sophie. Let me get my screen sharing going here. I got to get everything arranged just right to make it work right here.

1:25 Okay, can you see that, Sophie? Are we good? Yep, looks good. All right, great. Well, hey folks, thanks for joining us. It's great to have everyone here joining us for this topic. Like Sophie said, it's really important to just kind of start at the basics, you know, I'll try to cover this in fairly basic things but rather quickly. Because we definitely want to try to get to some questions.

1:49 So when we talk about why should you plant cover crops, well, there's lots of reasons why. One of the things that we like to think about it is the Swiss Army knife that has all the different tools, all the different functions. Shout out goes to our friend Rob Meyers from the University of Missouri who I first saw have an illustration like this. We took what he had and we added some additional things. So cover crops can do lots of things just like this Swiss Army tool can do. I'm just going to cover some of the real basic ones, but there's just know that there's lots more things that cover crops are able to do than what I'm going to talk about here, but these are some of the basic ones that we see over and over again, both on our own farm as well as all of the customers that we work with all across the country.

2:36 So I want to focus first of all just on reducing erosion. Such an important topic. Even though we've done a lot of things to stop wind and water erosion, we know that it's still happening. It's heartbreaking stories when we see the stories about people dying in accidents because too much dust is blowing across the highways, or we see these heartbreaking pictures of so much of our precious top soil being washed away. Cover crops, one of the easiest things that cover crops will do is reduce erosion. When you have that soil covered, it's not going to blow away. It's not going to wash away. If nothing else that you do with cover crops, this is one of the easiest, most basic things that you can do. If you are heartbroken when you see your soil moving or washing away, this might be something to really consider of how can I stop that erosion, stop losing the soil that I have by planting cover crops. That's a real basic one, but it's a really important one and it's kind of where we start with a lot of people. When we started doing cover crops ourselves 16, 17 years ago, we just hated seeing that soil wash away. We want it to be covered up. This is one of the first places that we utilize cover crops to really help us.

3:54 Number two, we really want to improve that infiltration. We want to stop our soil leaving and then we want to get the water that falls. Right now I know a lot of you are like us. We're kind of in a dry patch right now. But the rains will come and when they come, they may come in a big way. With the climate variability, the rainfall events that we're getting, they're the

4:18 Less frequent and they're more intense. And so, it becomes even more important that we're able to capture what does fall. And so we've seen cover crops greatly improve the infiltration rates that we see. No till certainly helps with that, but cover crops really help increase those infiltration rates even more because number one, we've got the growing canopy of the cover crop that's breaking the impact of that rainfall drop, that raindrop as it's coming down. It hits that cover crop. It diffuses all that energy and then that moisture goes to the ground very gently. So, we're not blowing apart the surface of the soil and that rainfall is able to get in. And not only is it mitigating that impact amount, but the water then will tend to follow those cover crop roots right down into the soil. And we've seen this be very effective even with a dead cover crop. Even with a dead cover crop, so like something I planted last summer, it died with the winter and now it's springtime, but I've still got that out there. I've still got that canopy out. I've still got the residue out there. It's breaking the impact and then it's following those root channels. And sunflowers are a great example of this. We've seen sunflower stocks. We've seen that water just follow those roots right into the soil. So, if you are concerned about not getting all of the water that falls from the sky, all of the snowfall, getting it into your soil, cover crops can definitely help with that infiltration amount. And again, that's just so critical because we never know when the next rain is coming. We need to get it into the soil.

5:53 So, the third one that I want to talk about here briefly is weed suppression. This is such an important one. This is one where we have a lot of people coming to us and saying, 'Hey, you know what? Palmer amaranth is just kicking my butt or you know, Mare's tail is just a problem. It's becoming resistant to so many different herbicide families. Can cover crops help with that?' And the answer is yes, absolutely they can help with that. Are they going to be the single solution to all of your problems? Well, not necessarily. In some instances they can be, but oftentimes it's part of the solution that farmers are employing to combat these really difficult weeds. And I say not necessarily, but they can be. So just a little example from our own farm. You know, when we were no-tilling, you know, Mare's tail got to be one of the biggest issues that we had in our irrigated ground in a traditionally corn bean rotation, Mare's tail was just getting out of hand and it was getting resistant to about three different families of herbicides. It was getting really hard to control. Once we started using cereal rye, and it wasn't even super heavy rates of cereal rye, we've seen this be fairly effective at, you know, moderate rates, 40, 50 lbs of rye. It will control I would say 95 to 98% of all the Mare's tail out there. It doesn't even—it's and it's not just a shading effect. Mare's tail is not very competitive and so it's just out there because it's one of the first things to get going in the spring and there's nothing else competing. But when we've got a little bit of cereal rye out there or hairy vetch or whatever that fall planted spring growing cover crop is, it almost eliminates that issue or that problem. So we don't even worry about Mare's tail anymore where we have cover crops and anywhere where we have a gap the Mare's tail comes like crazy. So we know the seed bank is still there but the cover crops are very effective at suppressing that.

7:49 Now when you get later germinating things like water hemp or Palmer amaranth some of those things cover crops can definitely help especially with the early expression of those weeds. But if you really want to control those later on with a cover crop, now you've got to really think through how can I grow lots and lots of biomass in order to keep that weed from coming on late in the season. So our friend Rick Clark, who's an organic farmer in Indiana, he says he shoots for having 6 to 8,000 lbs of dry matter biomass at a minimum out there to provide some weed suppression for later in the season. So, it all kind of depends on what your goals are, but certainly weed suppression is an area.

8:33 Where we see people utilizing cover crops as a great benefit. And then we get to one of the ones that I think is one of the most exciting and has the potential for really helping us reduce some of our inputs and that's in making nutrients more available as well as nitrogen fixation. And those are different because nitrogen fixation is going to come primarily from the legumes. But as we're learning that there's lots of other organisms out there that fix atmospheric nitrogen like zodactor and aosporilla and some of the things in the basillus family, we can fix atmospheric nitrogen with non-legume plants in a healthy ecosystem.

9:13 That's one of the things that Dr. Christine Jones really taught us when she was here at her farm the two times that she's been here. That's one of the messages that she really pounded home is that there are other organisms other than just legumes that can fix that atmospheric nitrogen. So we want to have some legumes in the mix, but we don't necessarily have to get all legumes. We want to have a nice balance in order to fix that nitrogen.

9:40 But we've seen consistently we can grow 200 lb of nitrogen if that's your goal. And if you're an organic producer, that might be your goal. We can do that with a solid stand of hairy vetch, but you have to let it grow long enough, you have to get it planted early. There's lots of things that go into that. But if that's your goal, cover crops can help accomplish that. But it may come at some cost because having too much nitrogen out there, whether it comes in the synthetic form or from a cover crop when all that nitrogen floods your system, it can throw some other things out of balance and it can actually break down some of your soil aggregate structure.

10:19 And so we like to see a bit more balanced approach. And when we have the legumes in combination with cereal rye or triticale or oats or some of these other things, we can still get probably 50 to 70% of that nitrogen production but have it in a little bit more balanced form. And so then from a nutrient availability standpoint, when we have that biological activity happening, we see so much of these nutrients starting to release. You know, do you have lots of phosphorus, potassium, iron, calcium, all these things are in your soil and we just need the biology to help unlock those and make it available.

10:57 And so when we talk about nutrient availability, really what we're talking about is ramping up the biological systems within your soil and then letting the biology make those nutrients available. But we can't get really good biological activity unless we have good cover crop growth. Because the cover crops are feeding the biology through the liquid carbon root exudates through photosynthesis that feeds the biology. The biology then helps break down some of the minerals that aren't available to plants and it makes it available to the plant. So that's the system. That's how God designed the system. That's how, largely before commercial fertilizers, that's how a lot of the nutrients were being made available was through biology.

11:40 And so we're just trying to help people get back to the way that it used to be done by making those nutrients available. And then the last one I want to talk about because it's just such a great one. Anybody that has cattle knows the value of cover crops for making quality forage available for livestock. And especially with the price that cattle are right now, we've got a number of customers who are saying, you know what, I've got this piece of ground that hardly ever makes me any money because it's low production, it's just difficult to farm. And so I'm thinking about just not planting corn or not planting soybeans and planting a grazing crop there and running my cattle through it.

12:20 And that's such a great idea because it helps you regenerate that soil. It helps you really build that soil because now instead of taking things off, we're putting lots of things in. And so there's just any number of different ways that we can help you grow quality forage for your livestock with the cover crop. And some people would say, well, it's no longer a cover crop if you're grazing it. I think it still is.

12:44 If you're taking hay off of it and hauling it all away, then I wouldn't necessarily consider that a cover crop. That's more of a cash crop because you're removing so much. But with livestock grazing right on the field, right in the fields, then 80% of those nutrients are cycling back through. And so that's just a great benefit. And those are the funnest mixes to make because we usually have a lot of flexibility in what that looks like.

13:13 So again, so many different benefits. You can look at all the other ones there and we could talk this whole webinar series just on cover crop benefits. But those are some of the main ones. And if you have questions on some of these others, any of the sales team here at Green Cover would be happy to help talk about how these other things can be accomplished with different cover crop mixes. And that's the beauty of the cover crop mixes: because when we mix different species together in the right combinations, now we can accomplish multiple benefits at the same time. Just like the Swiss Army knife, one cover crop isn't going to do all of these, but a cover crop mix can do many of these.

13:55 And so that's kind of what we specialize with here at Green Cover: helping figure out what combination of cover crop species would make a mix that would help you accomplish the goals that you have. And your goals are going to typically be coming right off this chart here of the things that you want to try to accomplish. And so with all that in mind, okay, you convinced me, cover crops are great, they do all these wonderful things. How do I get them into my system now? Where do I start? That's a pretty common question of where do I start.

14:24 And so for a lot of us, the corn bean rotation is pretty dominant here in Nebraska and across a wide area. And so that's typically where we see a lot of people asking, well, how do I get it into a corn bean rotation? And it's not the most ideal if you're planting your cover crop after corn or beans are harvested, but certainly there are great things that you can do even within this rotation. The easiest thing to do if you're just getting started, in our opinion, is you take your corn, try to harvest it as early as possible, and then plant a cereal rye based mix into your corn stocks. And then you plant your soybeans into that rye cover crop the next season.

15:11 Now, if you get it in early enough, we can add some other things in there like some rape seed, maybe even some safflower, depending on your timing. But cereal rye is going to be very reliably overwintering. And the thing about cereal rye, it's so good at sequestering nitrogen, and that's a really good thing ahead of the soybeans. It will deplete the soil of the free available nitrogen so it doesn't leech away, and then the soybeans are forced to nodulate. And so we really like that system. That's a great way to do it.

15:42 If you're coming into soybeans and going to corn, you can do that with cereal rye, but it's a little bit more tricky. You have to really watch that nitrogen tie up. And so the timing of your fertility application is really important there. But there's some safer things you can do. You can do things like winter barley, hairy vetch, winter peas, berseem clover. There's lots of things that can be done within a corn bean rotation, especially if you can get it out there early.

16:07 So my suggestion is you take the field where you really want to do a cover crop, you plant that first, you harvest that first. So then that gives you extra time to get your cover crop established, and then you come in with your next crop after that. So corn bean rotation, certainly we can do some things, but you're somewhat limited because there's only so many things that can work in September and October. So when you add a small grain into your rotation or if you have a small grain already in your rotation, now we can still do that cover crop combinations that I talked about, you know, between the corn and the bean part. But now when we have wheat or rye or winter peas or something like that where we're harvesting in the summertime.

16:54 When we can plant a cover crop in July or August, it really opens up the possibilities for having a tremendous amount of diversity because now I can use both cool season and warm season species within that mix. And so even if you only have wheat in your rotation once every four or five years, it still gives a huge boost of diversity to your system and it allows you to get a 10, 12, 15 way mix where we're growing huge amounts of biomass, we're growing lots of biological activity and we will see the effects of that big diverse cover crop mix persist for years after you've done it.

17:34 So it's not like you have to do it every year, even every other year, even every third year. We think once every four or five years will make a significant difference in the biology of your soil by doing that. But if all you're ever doing is corn and beans, then you don't have the opportunity to get that warm season diversity in there like you do with this.

17:54 And then of course if you take a regen or a grazing year like I referenced earlier, you know, with the price of cattle, with the price of corn, hey, I'm going to take my worst performing field out of production and I'm just going to plant cover crops and I'm going to graze it. You know, this is where you will make the biggest single year changes in soil of anything that you could do is by not growing a cash crop on it, by planting cover crops, by integrating the proper integration of livestock into there. You will literally make more changes in your soil than any other system that you can do. Even more than just planting cover crops and not grazing. The proper integration of livestock is important in that.

18:38 So if you've got just a really beat up piece of ground and you have cattle and you're buying hay anyway, then it makes a lot of sense to do this. Take that out of production from a crop, plant it to these covers, graze it, and you'll just really, really see some huge improvements in doing that.

18:55 So those are kind of the three ways that we can help you get started with cover crops. And it kind of depends on where you're coming from of where you're at in that. And again, you know, our sales team is really experienced in helping you think through what your options are and thinking through what's going to be best for your situation. And that's really kind of how we built Green Cover is to customize these mixes to meet the goals that you have on your individual operation because it's not a one-size-fits-all. So we need to have the ability to do some of that customizing.

19:30 Now, I wanted to kind of finish the talk that I have here, my session, with talking about the soil health principles because you've all heard these soil health principles and how important they are if we really want to regenerate our soils and get them back to the way that God created them to restore these ecosystems to get the biology back involved in the systems. And so I just want to go through these real quickly. It's not going to be new information to you, but I want to just mention how cover crops can help you with each of these principles of soil health.

19:59 Nothing else I don't think covers all of these principles like cover crops do. So in my opinion, keeping the soil covered, this is where we start personally. And I've just got some quotes from some people that, you know, we know that I really respect that are really smart. They're much smarter than us, you know, so if you can't be smart, at least hang out with smart people. That's kind of been our theory.

20:24 So Chris Nichols was actually one of the first people that we ever had come and speak at one of our Green Cover field days here. She was here in like year two or three. She says that soil covers your insurance policy against climate variability. It keeps the soil cool, moist, and alive no matter what the weather throws at you. And hey folks, we don't know what the weather is going to give us. Right now, it's giving a lot of us dry weather, but when it rains, it may break loose and give a big rain. And so if we can keep that soil covered, we're going to be the best protected against dry weather, against wet weather, against a drought, against a flood. Keeping your soil covered is so important.

21:02 Your insurance policy. And so that's what you should really strive for. Rick Clark, I mentioned him earlier, he says keeping the soil covered is like putting armor on your land. It protects against the elements and builds resilience from the ground up. And really as farmers we should be building as much resilience into our systems as possible because again we don't know what tomorrow will bring let alone this whole next growing season. So keeping the soil covered is one of the best ways we can do this.

21:31 So just a couple of pictures. This is one of our fields. This is actually a dryland field, and it's not a perfect stand of corn but it's not bad planting into all that residue. So this is wheat stubble and then all of the residue from a cover crop that was planted into that wheat stubble and then we went in there and this was a cover crop planted in July or August. So it all winter killed. So in our dryland situation, we don't feel like we can let our cover crops grow as long in the spring as we do on our irrigated or as long as what somebody further east like Rick Clark would. So we tend to try to plant these big cover crops in the summer so that we let the winter terminate it and then in the spring all we have to do is plant through that residue and there's lots of good planter adjustments. We've got really good equipment that is available to people now so you can plant through some crazy thick stuff that years ago people would have been scared to death to do. And so you can just slice through that and get a pretty good stand. And then the weed suppression on something like this is phenomenal. There's just very little weed pressure where you can keep that cover out there.

22:43 Here's another. This is on some irrigated beans. This was 5 foot tall cereal rye. We let it get headed out. You can kind of still see some of the cereal rye heads there. We planted into this green and then we rolled it down. And this picture, these soybeans, this was taken in August, so pretty late into the season, but we still have really, really good soil cover out there and no weed escapes where we had good cover. And so if you want to cut down on your herbicides, this is a great way to do it.

23:11 So number two, we want to maximize life and maximize the diversity that is out there. You know, our friend Gabe Brown, who again has was one of our early year speakers, and you know, we continue to work with Gabe on a number of different things. Gabe says diversity above the ground drives the diversity below the ground. The more species you plant, the more life you support. It's like hosting a party for your soil microbes. And who doesn't like a good party, right? Even your microbes like a good party. And so we want as much diversity above the ground so that we get that biological diversity below the ground. And then that's what is making those nutrients available.

23:49 Jonathan Lungren, who is one of the great ecological insect guys. He says, 'Diversity is the engine of resilience. The more players you have in your ecosystem, plants, bugs, and microbes, the better your farm can handle whatever nature throws at it.' So we want as much diversity as possible. This is one of our pollinator mixes that's got a great amount of diversity so we can attract a great number of insects. It's doing it's supporting a great number of biology below the soil. This is just a spring cover crop mix. For a little further south. So we had vetch, we had crimson clover, we've got some berseem clover, we've got rye, we've got winter barley. There's some peas in there. So all sorts of things. So again, as much diversity as what makes sense and the earlier you can plant, especially in the fall, the more diversity that makes sense. We don't want to put diversity in there if it doesn't make sense or if it's not going to work. And so if you're planting the middle of October, you're not going to have a lot of diversity choices, but planting cereal rye by itself is still better than not planting anything at all.

24:57 Number three, it's often called minimize disturbances, but I've liked to start thinking about it as optimizing

25:01 John Kemp just had a really good article in Acres magazine about optimizing your disturbances. I like to think of it as a disruption because you know these things like tillage that is a disturbance or a disruption but so is anything that we spray in our fields chemically that's a disturbance or that's a disruption to the system and even putting commercial fertilizer on is a disturbance to the system and we're not saying you should eliminate those. We're saying you should optimize those. Use them only when needed. These are tools. They're expensive to use. They serve a purpose. So use them when you need them, but don't use them any more often or any higher rates than you have to have. So we want to optimize those disruptions because they cost money. Jill Clapperton says disturbance burns up the soil savings account. It's carbon and organic matter. If you can minimize or optimize the tillage and chemicals, you're making deposits instead of withdrawals. So if we really want to build our system, then we really want to think about how do we optimize these disruptions within that system. It's not only going to save carbon, but it's also going to save money for us as well.

26:13 And then number four, the living roots as often as possible. We just need roots growing out there. Our friend Ray Archeletta says, 'If you don't have living roots, your soil's on life support. It's barely hanging on. Keep those roots growing and you're giving your soil a constant supply of energy to stay alive.' And that's where cover crops play such a key role, especially in these rotations where we have long breaks of time where nothing is growing. Cover crops can grow. We've had cereal rye growing all winter long. And so in that corn bean rotation, we have something green and growing, and it's putting living roots out there. Our friend Christine Jones says, 'The presence of living roots is the most important factor in soil health. They feed the microbes that build soil structure and store carbon. Without them, the soil ecosystem collapses. So we've got to keep things growing if we want to keep things living.'

27:08 It's just very simple, you know, it's photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is taking carbon dioxide. It's adding water to it. It's using the energy of the sun, the chlorophyll cells in a plant, and it's creating this glucose C6H1206. This is the basis of life. This carbon molecule then is turned into many different things inside that plant. And those different carbon compounds then are leaked out into the soil system into the rhizosphere and that's what the biology lives on. And so if you don't have a green growing plant, you don't have the ability to feed your biology and you don't have the ability to keep your soil alive and growing. And that's why that living root as often as possible is so critical.

27:53 And then number five, the proper integration of livestock. I've already talked quite a bit about this in terms of the benefit of providing that good forage. Alan Savory says, 'Livestock are the most powerful tool we have to regenerate soils, but only if we use them to mimic nature. Proper grazing management can turn degraded land into a thriving ecosystem.' One of the best TED talks, one of the most widely watched TED talks ever has been Allan Savories on how to reverse desertification. If you haven't watched that, I encourage you to go to YouTube and try to find that. But he really talks so passionately about how livestock can be the tool to help rebuild our soils. But improperly managed livestock are a great way to ruin a landscape as well. So it's all about how you use the tool. So that's why I say it's proper integration of livestock, not just integration of livestock.

28:45 So look at this beautiful picture. Some great looking animals here grazing a really diverse lush cover crop, just really putting on a lot of weight, doing really well. This steer here is from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. One of our customers sent this in. It was on the cover of one of our soil health resource guides a couple years ago. But you can really grow some great pounds.

33:14 It cost you a little bit more. If you don't think that you can get good seed to soil contact or if you're going to have reliable moisture to get that seed up and going, then you just need to go find a drill. A lot of conservation districts or Pheasants Forever have small drills that they rent out. Sometimes equipment dealers have drills that they rent out or find a farmer who does some custom work in your area that would come and drill that cover crop in for you. Because we have seen a lot of cover crop seedings fail because they just didn't have good seed to soil contact.

33:49 So especially in the summer if you're doing warm season things, there is a shorter window of time for that broadcasting to come up and work. If you're doing it in the fall, then you've got a lot of fall, winter to catch a snow storm or whatever to get that up and going, that's more forgiving. But if you're broadcasting seed in the summertime, it's just much more susceptible to having a tiny bit of moisture, sprouting it, and then it turns off dry for 2 weeks, and there's no root, there's no moisture. We've seen some failures that way. So warm season, in my opinion, it's more important to get it in the soil.

34:30 So yeah, start looking around. You know, get let us know. We're starting to build a list of custom applicators. We may not have anybody in your area, but we can try to help make some connections for you. And then if it's something you know that looks like it's going to work for you, start looking at how you can acquire a drill. Team up with other people in your neighborhood, other farmers maybe who don't have a drill. Look at buying one cooperatively. You know, people used to do that all the time. You know, they would buy equipment or they would share. I've got a drill. You've got a sprayer. Start partnering up with other people in your area or your neighborhood to do some equipment sharing or work co-oping. It's how people used to do it and I would love to see more people do that again.

35:18 Great. So one question that I have is say similar situation. Someone's brand new to cover cropping. They've never done it before. They plant a cover crop, they're super excited about it, and then maybe it comes up looking really wimpy or it's not this beautiful lush cover crop that they see in all the photos. What advice would you give to someone like that in that situation?

35:43 Well, yeah. Don't, you know, I mean, you've heard the saying, don't judge a book by its cover. Don't just judge your cover crop by what you can see above the ground because there may be lots of stuff going on underground and you're just not seeing that. So first of all, keep a shovel with you and do a lot of digging. Look at what the roots are doing. Look at if you're getting earthworms, kind of colonizing the rhizosphere around the cover crop roots. Oftentimes you will see that. When Chris Nichols was here for one of our early field days, I remember someone asked her the question, 'How long does a cover crop have to grow before you know it's worth it?' is kind of how they worded it. And she didn't really have to think about it too long because I think she's thought through this question before. She said 30 days. 30 days of good active growth on a cover crop. She felt like there was enough root activity, enough root exudates, enough biological support being done that it would offset maybe not the cost of the drilling, but certainly the cost of the seed. And in 30 days, your cover crop is not going to be very big. So if you were to just judge your cover crop after 30 days, you probably wouldn't say, 'Yeah, man, that was worth the $25 or $30 I spent on the seed.' But Chris Nichols is saying, 'Yeah, it probably is because you don't see what's going on in the soil.' And that's where she spends a lot of her time is looking at the soil, at the biology. And so don't just judge it by what you see above the ground. Be digging, be looking. The other thing is, and I really saw this in California.

37:25 With some of our orchard folks out there. The first year they do a cover crop, it's a little bit rough because they're planting it into an environment that just does not have very much biology, doesn't have much soil structure. There's just it's a very harsh environment. So their cover crops the first year always look pretty rough. The second year they get better. The third year it gets even better. And they're doing the same cover crop, same timing, same method, same everything. But it gets better because now you're starting to build this biological wave. So many of the benefits are cumulative and they're compounding and they're cascading and it just gets better and better. So don't give up. But also don't just judge it by what you can see above the ground.

38:11 Yeah, definitely. And this goes back to that concept too of cover crops almost being able to be an expression of what's going on within your soil. So if it looks like your cover crop is really struggling, that's because it's doing its best with what it's got. And so you'll see those get better over time and that's an indication of your soil health increasing. So here's a question from Paul in northeastern Oregon. He's sharing that a lot of folks out there who are planting wheat have a lot of concern about cover crops robbing the soil of moisture. They're in a very low rainfall environment, most areas with less than 12 inches of rain in a year. Can you address this concern in ways that folks might be able to mitigate this challenge?

38:57 Yeah, that's a great question, Paul. And the moisture usage of cover crops should be a concern for everybody. And it was certainly a concern for us before we started Green Cover. And when we—we've got some videos on our YouTube channel that explain this more, but what we found in our experiments is that a diverse cover crop mix will use moisture far more efficiently than anything planted by itself. So in your environment, I would never plant a cover crop that was just a single species or even two or three. I would do fairly diverse plantings if possible. And a lot of the moisture use is not coming from that first 30 or 45 days. It's coming from the back end of that growth. And so you can really control how much moisture is used by when you terminate. Now, you're also going to stop the benefits that are occurring—the erosion, all those benefits that I talked about, forage production, all of those. The longer it grows, the more of those benefits you're going to have. But at some point, you have to make the management decision. When do I terminate it in order to preserve the moisture that I have for the next crop? And again, it's all about context. In a context of a very dry environment, you aren't going to be able to let your cover crop grow right up until you plant the next crop. And so what we're doing for our dryland wheat farmers out here in western Nebraska, western Kansas, where they're probably maybe a little bit more rainfall than you, maybe 14 to 16 inches. If they're going to do a cover crop, typically what we're doing is they're planting right now where they've already planted a cool season cover crop—oats, peas, flax, rape seed, safflower, things like that. They've got that in the ground or they're getting it in the ground right now. They'll let that grow until about the middle of June. So the oats is just starting to head out. It's got some decent growth. We've got some decent biomass out there. And then they're going to terminate that so that it stops using moisture so that nothing goes to seed. They'll terminate that mid to late June, depending on where they're at. And now they've got the last half of June, all of July, all of August, all of September, first part of October to recapture moisture in that system for their next year's wheat crop. That's a much safer way to do it than if they planted a summer cover crop and they terminated it September 15th and then they're out there two weeks later.

41:33 Planting wheat. That's just not a smart thing to do in the context of dryland wheat. So you got to make it fit the context of where you're at and what you have to work with. But that's what I would say. Do really diverse mixes and then try to figure out how you can maximize that recovery time after the cover crop to recover the moisture that's been used.

41:57 Great. So we've got a few questions on here asking about different cover crop mixes and which ones should be used in which case scenarios. So maybe we can just spend a little bit of time talking about our pre-made mixes that are available on the website. So Keith, can you explain a little bit of how we go about designing those mixes and how they can fit a variety of different scenarios?

42:23 Yeah. You know, when we first started Green Cover, we didn't really have a lot of pre-made mixes. We were mixing pretty much everything on a custom basis based on where you were at, your goals and things like that. But what we found is, as we did this for a number of years, we found that we were kind of going back to the same basic recipe for many situations. So a warm season grazing mix, I could pretty much tell you right now what 90% of that mix is going to be. We may tweak it a little bit here and there, but we knew that if you were planting this when your soils are warm and you had a lot of growing season and you wanted to graze, we knew which things are going to work best in that. And same thing with the fall or a spring type mix. And so as we just got a lot more experience with this and as we worked with thousands of customers across all 50 states, we started seeing some real patterns emerge and we started saying, okay, well, we could put together a mix that's going to probably meet 85 to 90% of the needs of someone who is planting under these conditions in this context.

43:30 So we started making more of these pre-made mixes, we call them. And where it really saves people money is that if we don't have to do a custom mix for you, we can do it much cheaper because it's frankly hard, time consuming and expensive to make a custom mix for if you only want something for 2 acres, 3 acres, 5 acres. And so we're able to save people money by having some of these pre-made mixes that can fill that niche of what you're looking for within that context. And it makes it easy to order. You can order that on our online store or you can call in and order it too. But we can get that out the door to you quickly because we're making that ahead of time. We've got that sitting on the shelf and ready to go. So that's kind of where we started with that and now it's grown to where we have pre-made mixes for the wildlife food plots. We've got some designed specifically for gardeners. We got some for sheep pasture, warm season grazing mix, warm season soil builder. So I think we've got what, Sophie? Probably 25, 30 different pre-made mixes. Now, one of those is probably going to fit you pretty well. And if you don't need very much seed, it's probably a great way to start, or if you just want to do a small experiment, it's probably a good way to get going because it's going to be cheaper, it's going to be quicker, it's going to be faster. And then once you see what works, you know, hey, I really like the flax really look great. I'd like to have more flax next year. Now we can start helping you build a custom mix based on what you saw. So that's kind of how the pre-made mixes have really grown and it's become a very popular thing for people to order on the web store.

45:20 Yeah, definitely. And the nice thing about having those products on the website is we have pie charts that show all the different species in there, the ratios, so you know what you're getting. And then there's also detailed instructions on when to plant it, the planting rates that you need. So all that information is on there. And then if you ever have a question, you can always just give us an email. We can help you figure out what pre-made mix is the best option for you.

45:46 Also working on an online decision tool that you'll be able to just go in there and ask yourself a few different questions and then be able to find the right mix for you. So we've got some really great questions in here and a whole lot, but unfortunately we don't have time to answer them all. I think that a good one to land on would be this question from Grace. So she's asking first of all, what has been the biggest resistance for folks trying to incorporate cover crops into their systems and how has the acceptance of cover crops or the adoption of cover crops changed over the course of the past few years?

46:25 That's a great question, Grace. Well, you know, there's lots of barriers, lots of impediments out there. I think that for the people, I'll put it this way, for a lot of people, it's just not having the right mindset of thinking biologically and thinking that cover crops can help solve a problem or solve an issue or they don't recognize those benefits. So I'm going to set that aside and I'm going to say we're going to deal with this question for people that do have that mindset and people that do want to try to implement these because that's really two whole different subsegments of people, but if you're on this call, you probably have the right mindset. So we'll set that aside. For the people that have the mindset, they have the desire, they understand the benefits, I think it probably boils down to a timing thing, especially if you're in that corn bean rotation. I probably hear more often than anything that we just don't have time to do it. You know, I'm not getting my crops off until mid-October, late October, we're running out of time. And certainly you're out of time or it's too late to do the really nice big diverse mix, but like I say, the easiest place to start is planting cereal rye into your corn stocks and planting beans the next year. Well, you can plant cereal rye. If you can get the drill in the ground, you can plant cereal rye. I don't care if it's December, you can plant cereal rye. So I think that people use that as an excuse. It's certainly going to prevent you from having a really nice diverse mix. But like I said, planting cereal rye by itself, we do that a lot because we're in the same boat and when we don't get things harvested as early as we would want, but we plant a lot of cereal rye by itself. It's better than doing nothing for sure. And so don't be ashamed of that. It's a great place to start. So I would say that that would be one of the biggest ones and probably following right behind that is it's just been really dry across a big area. And so you know, just concerns over soil moisture and not having the moisture to get something up or to get something growing. That's a big impediment as well. And unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do with that.

48:51 Certainly if it's a super dry area and you've got cattle and hay is going to be expensive again it might make sense for you to take some acres out of crop production and plant cover crops especially if you could plant them for things that you want to graze in December and January when hay is going to be the highest and the most work. We can help you with mixes that you can graze in that off season in that winter time and really generate a lot of money savings, cash flow if you will, money not spent is still cash. Those situations are easily achievable with a good cover crop mix.

49:36 Awesome. Well, I think we're going to wrap it up there. Thank you everyone for attending live today. We had a great crowd and lots of really engaged listeners asking great questions. So if your question didn't get asked today, feel free to reach out to us, either through our website or give us a call, and we'll be happy to help answer your questions. Sophie, we can roll some of these forward to the ask me anything one as well. So make sure you tune in for that one because your question may come up there as well.

50:06 Yeah, I've got all the questions recorded. So if you asked a question we didn't get to it, we'll have it for the ask me anything at the end of the series.

50:18 Awesome. Thank you, Jonathan. So yeah, join us next week at the same time Wednesday at noon Central Standard Time, and we'll be talking about cover crop species selection. And thanks everyone for joining today. Thanks everybody.