Why You Should Run Your Own Test Plots

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

0:16 It's really important to experiment and to learn and to have that curiosity factor. And today my guest is my coworker Nathan Show. Nathan runs a lot of our test plots here at Green Cover and we wanted to have a conversation about what that looks like, how we've done it in the past, how we're doing it now, and why it's important for us to do that, but why it's important for you to consider doing some of your own test plots and demonstration plots as well.

0:43 I think this is going to be a really interesting conversation and part of it is we have our field days coming up August 4th and 5th of 2026, but this episode's not just going to be about that. So if you're listening to this after the fact, there's still going to be really valuable information here. Nathan, welcome to the podcast.

1:06 Yeah, thanks Keith. Excited to be here.

1:08 So why don't you start out by just giving us a little bit of your history, your background? You know, you're a farm kid from here in Nebraska. Just share a little bit about your background, your education, and how you ended up here at Green Cover.

1:22 Yeah, absolutely. I'm a born and raised Nebraskan. My family's been farming in the state of Nebraska since just after the Civil War. So we have a long history. Sometimes I say agriculture is just in my blood. I was raised in a conventional Nebraska farm, row crops. When I started high school though, my dad started managing a ranch up in northeast Nebraska, a cow calf operation. It was from birth to slaughter. So we were finishing all the animals we were raising and so that kind of opened the door into a different world. I was my grandparents' farm very conventionally. My uncle still runs that operation very conventionally doing the best they know how. But then we started raising cattle, trying to grass finish animals, talk about holistic management, good animal husbandry.

2:07 And in that operation we actually started using green cover products. We were grazing rye in the spring, chopping some forages. This would have been like 2012 or 2013.

2:19 So my first introduction to green cover was as a customer. We would buy mixes, me and my brother raise some still and we did at the time. We actually would graze the loose forages with the sheep. When I was in college at the University of Nebraska studying agriculture economics, I was looking for a summer internship. Because I was in the green cover network and heard about the opportunity here. And so in 2018, I came and spent the summer here at Green Cover doing everything from mix floor operations stuff to test plot stuff to some sales exposure and really had a good summer.

2:54 You know, went back to school, finished my degree. I did spend a couple years at a big agricultural lender there in Omaha. Learned a lot on the finance side. I do like numbers, so that was good, but Omaha wasn't for me. Needed to get out of there. So I reached out to you, Keith, and sure enough, there was an opening to make the move. That was back in 2022. So this is my fifth year already with Green Cover as a sales rep and working with our test plots. It's been a good journey so far.

3:23 Yeah. And it was great to have you back. And you're still able to utilize some of that economics and finance backgrounds because you do some part-time financial work here at Green Cover. Well, so you get to scratch that itch every now and again.

3:39 Yep. Absolutely. So, I'm still kind of tend to be a numbers first person, even though as a seed salesman, obviously agronomy and plant science and soil science is really important, but I think that's good because at the end of the day, I'm trying to help my customers be profitable with our products, right? So I consider the return on investment and the economics of the products that we offer in addition to the soil health benefits, but I like to look at both.

4:04 Yeah. So one of the ways that we're able to utilize your analytical background, your analytical mindset is you're kind of in charge of our plots. And we do lots of plots every year. I don't even know how many you and the team have planted this year. Hundreds and hundreds.

4:30 What we do, because I do think that's important, but it, you know, again, you're the right guy to do it because you're not just throwing things out there and forgetting about it. You're very analytical. And maybe talk just a little bit about why that's important when you're doing, you know, and I don't know that I consider this pure research. It's partly research, partly demonstration, but it's a proofing concept. Is this going to work? What is this, how does this work? You know, what will it do when you plant something in March instead of May? And so we do all sorts of things, but why is it important that we really analyze that?

5:06 Yeah, absolutely. When I started with green cover back in 22, we were doing one big test plot in May, planting basically everything, and then we would do an October, kind of a mid-October overwintering set of plots. And that was good, you know, that was good, but we've definitely advanced from there. Basically, at this point, we're planting plots pretty much every month. That allows us to one put every species in their ideal condition, but also then stress a lot of species and like, okay, well, can we push this forward? Can we push this back? How late can we plant oats? How early can we plant sorghum and millet? How late can you plant some of these overwintering species or the winterkill species? Like really trying to experiment and see where the fits are.

5:44 It's absolutely not university scientific research. I'm not an extension agent. I don't want to be a scientist. This is on the farm, you know, farmer type research. So it's not, you know, randomly placed and triple replications and all those sorts of things. This is exactly what our customers would do. Take product, put it out there, observe it, you know, take biomass samples, maybe brix readings, sap testing, you know, tissue samples, whatever. But just seeing how do these things work and then doing it year in and year out in different plots. And even though it's not maybe, you know, peer review type research, we can get really comfortable with it because if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. You know, the number one way to know if to evaluate something and know if it works is just to simply observe it, right? What does it look like? How is it responding to these conditions?

6:36 So, yeah. And then at this point, you know, we have started kind of expanding the test plots and the experimentation. You know, originally it's kind of just here in Bladen where the main hub was and it still is our biggest test plot. But, you know, at this point, as you know, Keith, we have plots out in Iowa with the Farm Progress Group and out in Illinois with the Farm Progress Group. We have a set of plots up at Grand Island for Husker Harvest Days, and we have a set of plots down in Iola, Kansas at our Iola location. So we've expanded somewhat geographically, still obviously Midwestern based. But that gives us, you know, four different soil types, four different moisture cycles. And it's cool to see how species move north, south, east, west, and in those rainfall conditions. So, yeah, I mean, if you're spending money on products, if you're, you know, writing a check for something, you want to know if it's working. And so, why would you ever just plant something and not observe it, right? You need to be evaluating, are you making good choices on your farm? Are you getting a return on your investment?

7:38 And that, so what that probably looks like is, hey, you need to be evaluating what you're currently doing, making sure it all makes sense, but you need to be looking at the next things, right? What could you be doing next? What changes could you make on an operation to take it to the next level or find the new practice? And that's where experimenting comes in. You know, there's a reason why big companies have an R&D budget.

7:57 If they don't experiment, if they don't innovate, they never change. If they never change, eventually someone beats them out, right? So you always have to be looking at what are you doing, trying to hone that in, but what could you be doing? What should you be trying? And so, that's where, you know, it's expensive, you know, from it. It can be expensive from a time, from an investment standpoint, you know, because it takes time to put in test plots and it takes time to evaluate and observe and go back and check on what you've done. But, you know, that can be some really good ROI because you might hit on the thing, the next practice that really changes the operation.

8:29 Right? And you're right, it's probably more expensive from a time standpoint than a financial standpoint, if you're doing it, you know, at relatively small scales. I mean, a lot of our plots are six feet wide, so we

8:41 Don't have a ton of investment in seed, but it's a lot of time investment in monitoring it, collecting the data on it. And I love when I go out to our plots and I see things growing really, really great. But what I also love is I love going out there and seeing plots that are completely blank or look terrible because that means we tried some things that didn't work and we learned because we can learn from that. You know, I always remember Gabe Brown back in the early days when he was learning all these things and sharing, speaking widely, and I always remember Gabe saying, you know, he considered it a failure if he didn't try at least three things throughout the year that didn't work cuz he says otherwise I didn't try enough. I didn't push the envelope enough. And so, when we do these plots, we are throwing things out there that we don't think will probably work. And a lot of times they don't, you know, for usually it's a timing thing, but sometimes we try some things like here's one example of this. I went out to your March planted plots and you had planted coriander, which is a new plant for us and didn't have a lot of experience with coriander, which, you know, cilantro, it's the same plant. It's a very interesting cover crop. And I thought, well, this is a warm season crop. You guys are kind of wasting your time planting out the Lord. Lo and behold, in May that plot looked awesome, looked great. And so, you know, we learned that it can handle some cold weather. And so, now that just expanded where and when I would use coriander in some of the mixes I put together. Had you not done that, I would have just said, 'Well, we can't plant that until after the last frost.' So, you know, that's just one example of how we've learned how to position different species for different goals, for different geographies, for different time frames.

10:43 Yeah, it's if you're not trying, what is the saying? If you're not failing, you're not trying, right? Like, I'm a big pitch player. My family's a big pitch player, and my grandpa would always say, 'If you don't go set once in a while, you're not bidding high enough.' Right? Like you have to try and again like you said six foot plots it's not a lot of seed it's not a lot of acres that we're committing to that plot but we do learn and as a seed company for our customers you know we always want to be testing we always want to be experimenting you know we try to plant every seed at least once like every seed that we sell we try to plant it at least once every year to see how is this performing you know let's get some varieties let's get some seeds from some competitors let's compare them do we have the best varieties for our customers yeah the coriander I mean that was a new last year. Hey, we're still figuring out what the fit for is the fit for that plant is, but we're figuring out it grows really well. It's pretty easy to grow. All of a sudden, it's not just summer, it's also spring. How late in the fall can we plant it?

11:40 You know, it's we have to experiment. You know, Green Cover was one of the companies that really brought like okra as a forage to the market because you guys were experimenting before my time and saw, hey, this plant has a fit. So, we're always looking for the next thing to try and to bring to customers.

11:58 Yeah, and that's a great point. You know, Green Cover was really developed out of a set of experiments. And, you know, our Smart Mix calculator, which I feel like is the best cover crop selection tool, you know, in the industry. And it's completely free to use. And I think it's the best because it has the best data set inside of it because of all the data that we've collected over the years. You know, I got to figuring up, Nathan, you know, we. So, our field day is coming up here August 4th and 5th. This will be the 18th year in a row that Green Cover has done a field day. And some years we have done more than one, two, three, sometimes you know, we have as many as three or four throughout the year, but one major big one in the fall. So, the 18th year, but it's interesting because we actually did a field day before Green Cover ever even existed. You know, in 2008, my brother and I had a little Sarah ground. We got like $5,000 to buy moisture sensors because the big question in our minds was, okay, we can plant these cover crops, but are they going to use too much moisture? And so, we needed to answer that question for ourselves before we even wanted to use them on our own farm, let alone sell them. We hadn't even been thinking about selling them yet. We were just talking our own farming operation. So, we had this little Sarah grant. We planted

13:21 Like 18 different strips of monoculture cover crops. We put the moisture sensors at 1 ft, 2 foot, and 3ft depths. We hooked them up to data loggers. And this is, you know, back in 2008, we didn't have all this wireless technologies, though. We had these little tiny wires strung all over our field hooked up to these data loggers and then we'd have to go out and download it onto a stick drive. You know, pretty cool technology at the time. You look at it now and you'd go that's nothing. The sensors they have now are pretty incredible. But we took moisture readings throughout that whole summer of 2008. And I've talked about this lots of times, but what we learned is that everything that grew in a monoculture used a lot of the moisture that we got. And we actually had some decent moisture that summer because this is planted into wheat stubble in July. But where we planted the mixes, the mixes were so much more efficient at how they use moisture. And the moisture level in the mixes was not that much less than just in the bare wheat stubble. And so really it was that set of demonstration plots that really gave us the idea that hey we think maybe cover crops will work on our operation here at Providence Farms, but we think it can work for lots of people as well.

14:47 So maybe we can sell these things because we learned that it was hard to find the seed when we were looking for all these. And the other thing we learned is how amazingly awesome the cattle did on these mixes because we had planted the rest of that 80 acres to, you know, basically a blend of all the different seeds put together. And those cattle came off there later that winter and they I mean they looked like they came out of a feed lot. They were fat and they were happy and you know you go out there and they'd have turnips hanging out of their mouth and it was just like wow this is pretty amazing. So that's why we started Green Cover.

15:21 But that summer as part of our Sarah grant, you know, and we didn't know what our results would be, but later that summer, we had a field day in 2008 before Green Cover ever existed. We didn't even have a name yet cuz on our wall out here, we've got this piece of sheet metal, this tin siding that we had posted on the highway just saying, 'Hey, no till cover crops field day.' Really crudely stenciled on there and spray painted letters. Our marketing department would cringe if they saw that now. We've come a long way, but it's a reminder. You know, and we probably had 40 or 50 people all that showed up for that. But we showed all the plots and we looked at the grazing and you know, we basically started educating even before Green Cover existed.

16:10 And I'm glad that we saved that sign because it's a reminder of how we started. And every time I walk past that, I think we need to keep innovating. We need to keep experimenting. We need to keep demonstrating and we need to keep educating because that's how we started. I think that's how we've grown and that's how we're going to be relevant in the future. And I think that's the case not just for Green Cover, but for any farmer, you know, you need to be pushing the edges, pushing the boundaries and experimenting a little bit.

16:43 So, you know, the other blessing from doing this over the years is once we started Green Cover and we launched it and we had these summer field days, you know, we got all the great in. You know, we've had Gabe Brown and Dwayne Beck and Jay Fear and Joe Clapperton and Chris Nichols and Christine Jones and the list goes on and on. They've all been here right at the farm. And hopefully many people listening to this have been here to one or two or all of our field days and been able to not just learn from us, not just learn from the plots, but also from the people that we bring in that can teach because they've got worldwide expertise and perspective and not just a local perspective. So that's been one of the blessings of doing these field days over the past 19 years is we've gotten to interact with some of the really great great people.

17:37 So let's talk a little bit about what you've got planning out in the plots right now, Nathan. Some of the interesting things that you have seen, what you know, if people come to our field day, you know, not just this year, but in future years as well, what can they expect to see?

17:54 Yeah, absolutely. Well, like I mentioned, we try to plant plots throughout the season. So, you know, looking towards an August field day, we always do a really big planting late May, 1 of June, you know, so we have as many species and mixes on display for that August field day.

18:15 We're still currently cutting this in July. Our March plots are starting to look a little rough. I don't know if they'll still be around or if I'll go ahead and pull the plug on those and turn that plot over. We will have some July planted kind of stockpile plots going in. So looking at late season cover crops options after cereal harvest because we'll harvest some barley field right there and then look at some options after that. We have a pretty big corn and soybean interseed trial this year and it's kind of been a project we've been building upon. I think we started four years ago with our first set or maybe three years ago now with our first set and then have been growing that. This year we're looking at a lot of different soybean options, monocultures, mixes, different combinations of things, trying to figure out what the right species perform best, what ones provide the most soil services for us, control weeds, all those sorts of things. So a lot of crop interseeding and a lot of individual strips. It's probably one of the largest displays of individual monocultures. I think that early June planting was like 104 plots that went in, so of mixes and monocultures. So that's a pretty diverse group there. So it's about 10 acres all told between the interseeding and the individual strips this year. So everything that you could plant in the summer will be growing out there as long as the plot didn't fail. But like you said, a couple failures is good.

19:44 So if you've been to our field days in the past, we have new things this year, right? We have some new species. There's several new warm season grasses this year that we're experimenting with. Some brachias and some congo grass and things that we're just starting to take a look at, see what the fits are for those. You can come and look at those. We're pushing again like the coriander, the dills, some different sunflower varieties, kind of looking at some different things there. And a whole new set of mixes. The team's been building out kind of our website pre-made mixes. All of those are most of those are out in the plots. So evaluating those blends, what are the ratios? So if you're a forage person, we have tons of options for wildlife. If you're wanting, if you're more of the rowcrop guy, want to look at biology, look at nutrients, we're working on that. We really should have something for everyone. The first time cover cropper who's just getting ready to go, we have plenty of 101 stuff. But also the experienced guy, there's some cutting edge things that we're looking at, too.

20:45 I have basically described what you and your team are doing and put in. I describe it as kind of a cover crop petting zoo. Where else can you go and see close to a hundred different species and cultivars within some of those species? Where else can you go, see those, touch those, feel those, look at how they're interacting with each other in mixes? It's just really a great opportunity to see what sunhemp looks like, what okra coriander looks like. And now we've expanded into multiple varieties of sunhemp. We're looking at the mini sunhemp as a grazing and food plot option, much smaller plant, much leafier. And the grasses that you're talking about, these are ones that we had people in Brazil using very successfully and saying, hey, we think these will work for you too. But before we import a whole container load of it and try to sell it, we import a bag of it so we can see how it does. It might be great and it might be that we're too far northward for that to work or I don't know. But that's what we do.

22:01 How many different sorghums would you say you planted out there? 15 or something, I don't know. It's a lot. Yeah, and again, the reason is everybody knows what sorghum looks like, okay, great. But sorghum has all these great traits, BMR and bkitic dwarf and photoperiod sensitive and dry stock and combinations of them. And there are so many different combinations because it can fit lots of different options and we have to know what those are going to look like in order to position it the best and mixes for our customers. So the sorghum plots are, you may look at them and go, wow, they don't really look all that different, but if you really start studying them, if you see them growing from start to finish, then you really can understand how they've worked.

22:52 Well, that's where we can add more precision, right, to what we're doing. No one would just buy an off-the-shelf bag of corn seed and plant it everywhere, right? You're like, 'Okay, what are the goals? What are the context? What's the timing? When am I planting? When am I grazing or harvesting?' And then you hone that in and that's where you know green cover we don't just carry one sorghum sedan cross right like we have all these different traits some people don't need the BMR they're not harvesting forage they don't need to spend the money right like so just depending on the goals and the context so we have to have all those products and we have to have what we think are the best products so then we have to compare to the other products to see do we have the best products.

23:27 And you know really evaluate those for our customers to make sure that green cover is taking care of our customers the best we can. Yeah and again that it just takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of, you know, six foot drill passes, stop, vacuum it out, put the next seed mix in.

23:45 You guys have, I'm sure, made an art out of that because not only have you done hundreds of plots here, like you mentioned, you know, you planted, you drove all the way out to Boone, Iowa, and planted the Farm Progress plots out there and then to Grand Island and we've got Husker Harvest Days plot, which is kind of cool because now instead of being seen by hundreds of people that come to Green Cover, literally those are being seen by tens of thousands of people at these really big farm shows.

24:16 Yeah, that's been a really great opportunity just you know Farm Progress the parent company recognizing that you know Green Cover is a leader in this space that we have the expertise that we have the knowledge base and then trusting us right they do just kind of say hey here's a space we want you to come and demonstrate your products and then they give us the reins and we get to go out and do what we think's best. It's admittedly a little tricky because like as green cover we want to be on the cutting edge. We're a leading seed company in this regenerative space and then I go to Boone Iowa the heart of conventional soybean and corn country and it's like how do I not scare them or overwhelm them with some of our products and things and kind of narrow our focus a little bit. So yeah, you know, if someone's listening to this and they're not able to attend our summer field day here, but they can swing by Boone or Grand Island this season or hopefully in years to come, that's another a chance to see some of our plots as well.

25:13 Yeah. And the other thing is I know when we started up there at Husker Harvest days, you and I went up there, we looked at the plot and it's like this is basically a grass parking lot because, you know, it had been a show space for ever. That soil was hard. It was rocky. This will be the third year we've done it at Grand Island. And I'm really interested I think after Husker harvest days this year I'd really like to take some soil samples from where we've been doing our plots and then do one, you know, next door where nothing's been growing. It'll be a great way to see how we can change soil by using cover crops.

25:54 Yeah, that and we can see it already, right? We are improving our water infiltration on that plot because the show plots are irrigated. But with that first year, if I put on a quarter inch of water, I had run off, right? I couldn't get anything to soak in. And it's taken time and we still have a long ways to go before this is good, you know, farm ground. But even after three years, the drill goes in so much easier. And yeah, it's a good testament to the power of plants to fix soil.

26:26 Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. And we need to make sure that's part of, you know, what we do because we'll do what two tours each day of each one of these shows. The organizers give us two 30 minute time slots where we'll do a walking tour and show people, you know, what we've got and be able to answer questions. So, that's a great opportunity. I want to go back, Nathan, to, you know, the monoculture plots, you know, having a strip of this, a strip of that. Those are all really interesting but one of the things that has probably drawn as much interest as anything is the interseeding, interseeding in the corn and into beans. Partly because it's really hard. It's really hard, really challenging because not only do you have, you know, seeding issues, you've got sunlight issues, there's chemical questions you have to answer. So we've really leaned into that both for our own benefit as well as that of our.

27:23 Customers continue to ask questions about that. There's so much interest because if we can make it work, it kind of solves the issue of 'I don't have time after harvest or during harvest to plant' and you know it gets too late in the season to plant after I pick my corn, you know, the end of October. So we've really been doing a lot of work with the corn and lately with soybeans as well.

27:49 But what are some of the things that you have learned and maybe we've translated over into our farm and our customers? Let's start with the corn interseeding plots first.

28:02 Admittedly, we've learned a lot of what not to do. So that's always good, right? When you can save some customers some time. I feel like one of my biggest jobs as a sales rep is to tell people no. Like, probably don't do that. Like, maybe not that. I love experiments, but if we can share some wisdom and some experience and maybe skip some things. Yeah, really honing in the species. It really becomes a timing piece. It comes down to sunlight a lot on the corn or seed. So if you have a lot of sunlight, you have a lot of options. If you don't have much sunlight, you don't have very many options at all. And I realize that's maybe overly simplified, but if you can get that cover crop established early enough, that seems to help it push through the season. But if it gets too late, the plant's just not well enough established to go.

28:51 You know, the one question I kind of have this year is say we do a corn, you know, interseeding. Because we grow such good corn here in Nebraska, right? It's too aggressive and it shades out the cover crop in some instances. What do we do in the soil, right? What does—you mentioned a lot of times it just takes like 7 weeks, 50 days, whatever to really benefit. So we're doing a lot of soil testing this year. I don't have the results to share because we're not done with the experiment, but we're doing some soil testing this year to see, hey, in that window of time, what did we see? Did we move the needle on anything? What was the benefit of that cover crop?

29:26 Again, a lot of things come down to economics for me. That cover crop seed is an input. The time to drill it is an input. What's my return? If I can push that inner seed all the way to fall, if I can get those species to survive, there's a grazing value. I can calculate that and determine, hey, that's the value. But what if it does, you know, fizzle out? What's the value there? And so we're still experimenting to answer that question. But in regards to what works really well, again, the sunlight. If we're talking narrow rows, if we're talking about, you know, 250 bushel corn or 300 bushel corn, that's just not a lot of sunlight. It's hard to push through. If we widen things out, the list of what works grows really long, right? Those plants have sunlight. They have space to grow. Plants need moisture and sunlight to grow, but that space is often the factor there.

30:15 So the same thing with our mixes. We can't—when you put multiple seeds together in a mix, you have to back off the different seeding rates to give plants space. So in the 30-inch rows, the cool season things seem to do the best. Specifically, the brassica family: radishes, turnips, collards, rape seed, mustards. Those reliably are the best and most reliable things to grow. And then, I think from a soil health and agronomic standpoint, they make sense, right? Most of our Midwestern corn-soybean countries—just corn, soybean. All of a sudden, we get brassica in there. That's an entirely different plant family that never gets to grow on our crop fields normally because in a traditional setting with an October fall cover crop, there's no brassica that really works. Maybe canola or rape seed, but that's hit or miss.

31:02 So the brassicas do well. Honestly, I like buckwheat and flax a lot also. Those tend to be ones that, planted early, will fizzle out before. But I think they can provide some weed control and some soil health benefits. Legumes can work. I think there's a little bit of a misconception on 'if I plant a bunch of legumes in my corn, that's my nitrogen.' I don't think that's how that works because we fertilize our corn, you know, corn fields so well. I don't think the legumes are going to nodulate very much. So I tend to steer people away from legumes and focus more on soil cover, weed control, and pollinators. That tends to be more my focus or grazing if that's a consideration.

31:39 And I would say that in our interseeding plots, I would agree with you. We probably had more plots that didn't look great versus ones that were just fantastic. However—

36:42 Dill and sunflower out there. So we'll really see what it looks like. I mean, so far so good. And that's what's fun, you know, and again, these aren't giant plots. These are planter widths, maybe an eighth of an acre each plot or something. So we're not set aside, we're not setting aside 40 acres to do one mix. We're just doing some strips and some fields. We'll see how the species perform. We observe through the season, right? Because like flax or that's one of those that early on probably looks pretty good and it might fizzle out. Well, but if you just go out there and check it in October, you're never going to see any. So you'll think it failed. But that's the time investment that goes into experiments. Like you have to watch it. If you never come back, if you plant and walk away and don't come back to harvest, you might miss something.

37:27 Yeah, and with the soybeans success is not having it out there at harvest time run that through the combine. So, in the case that I mentioned, you know, with the guy in Minnesota, he was in row roller crimping his most down. You know, if you're not an organic producer, you've got, you know, herbicide termination options to do with a kind of a late post spray, which is what a lot of people do. And you mentioned Alex Frasier. We had Alex on the podcast earlier in the year. He's doing some really cool things with the same concept up in South Dakota. So I would encourage you to go back and find that episode with Alex of the Green Cover podcast here. And then we had Jay Furer here in early June for our Nexus in the Field event. And it was really interesting because he was talking of course Jay is the kind of a legend in the soil health world. Runs the Manoken Farm up in Bismarck, North Dakota area. He and Gabe Brown did a lot of the pioneering work within this movement, you know, back 25, 30 years ago. So we owe a big debt to Jay. And he was here and he mentioned how North Dakota used to be, especially his area. It used to be a big wheat state. Wheat was the number one crop. He says it isn't anymore. It has shifted so much over to soybeans, you know, from an economics standpoint. But he said that's been so bad for the soil because soybeans, you know, they're a low residue crop. They're a legume crop. And so everything cycles so fast, they are really left with very little residue, very little carbon into the soil. So they've really leaned into this interseeding concept because he says when they interseed into the soybeans now they can add so much to the amount of carbon now that that piece of the rotation will put back in. So they're in the midst of learning how to do that up in North Dakota as well. And Alex Frasier was actually up there and spoke at one of their field days. And so what a great thing that we have this community where Nebraskans and Montanans and South Dakotans and North Dakotans we can all share information. We can experiment. We can learn. We can fail and say well this didn't work here but I think it might work for you if you change this or tweak this. It's worth a try anyway. And I just love how the community can come together to do those sorts of things.

40:00 Have you picked up some ideas from some of your customers or things you've seen at other field days that you have implemented in our plots?

40:10 Oh yeah. Yeah. I go to, I mean in part of my role with Green Cover, I get the privilege of traveling a lot, right? So farm visits and conferences and I'm always taking notes of things to try or species to push the envelope with or seeding rates to experiment with and practices. The soybean interseeding is definitely one that came out of a conference directly. You know, when that customer shared there two years ago at the Nexus event, that's we came home and we got to try it, put it in ourselves and push the envelope and experiment.

40:41 Yeah, and it's just really cool to see how you know these practices when you start experimenting and like oh let's try that, you do it on a set acres like those a lot of them do fail and then you move on but then some of them you tweak you refine and they could become really common you know widespread practices too like this is now what we do on tons of acres because it works so good and you just never know what that next experiment will be that does pay off so big. I have customers that yeah they they started with I heard about you know they heard about black oats and they planted them in the garden in just a little spot like oh that looks pretty good and now they're you know doing thousands of acres of black oats because it it it worked so well for them and then they expanded.

41:25 Just that importance of the experimentation matched with the followup. In the test plots, trying the different timings of the plantings, pushing the coriander to the spring. One thing that we did two years ago in the plots was we planted a bunch of warm season stuff in with cool season stuff in March to see if the cool season species, or the warm season species, would just wait in the cold soil and then come later, and they sure enough they did. That was an idea that we got from a customer to try. So yeah, there's always learning from each other and that's the importance of the community that you pointed out and of attending conferences and field days and being in Facebook chats and all sorts of things like learning from each other and you can go forward faster.

42:14 I remember one of my potato customers from Colorado. He's interseeding when he plants his potatoes, and potatoes get planted 6 inches deep. So when he's doing that, he wanted some variety in there. So he's planting a couple kinds of peas, fava beans, chickpeas, and big seeds that can push up out of the ground, and those are things that will start blooming before the potatoes bloom, so it attracts beneficial insects. But anyway, he says, 'Well, how about buckwheat? Can I put buckwheat in there, too?' I'm like, oh, you don't want to do that. Buckwheat, it'll die with the frost. It's not as big a seed. I said, it's not going to come up from 6 inches deep, and if it does, it's probably going to freeze off.

43:03 Well, he did it anyway, and I'll be darned if it didn't work. And he's got buckwheat coming up from 6 inches deep. Part of it is it's coming up with all these other things, but it's by far the first thing to bloom. Thirty days after that sucker gets out of the ground, it's blooming and bringing in all these beneficial insects for him. And it's growing right in the potato row and it's way past maturity by the time he harvests his potatoes. So it doesn't impede his harvest or anything. But if he would have listened to me, he would have done that. So I'm very careful now. I almost never tell people no. I will sometimes say I think that's a great idea to try on a small scale because if I don't know, I'm not going to tell them to try it on a thousand acres.

43:53 But I no longer tell people stuff doesn't work unless I've absolutely seen it not work over multiple locations. Because here's the thing, and I can't stress this enough to people listening: context is one of the soil health principles for a very good reason. And that's because just because you go to a field day and you see something working in Bladen or you see it working in North Dakota or Colorado or wherever, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work the same way on your operation. It might, and it certainly is worth trying, but you need to do your own local experiments, plots, demonstrations—whatever you want to call them—in order to determine the context. Maybe it'll work, but your timing has to be a little different. Maybe it'll work, but your seeding method has to be a little different, or it fits into your rotation a little different, or your herbicide program is different. You certainly need to try, but you need to try it on your own operation before you go huge scale with it if it's something that is not proven in your own operation or your own specific area.

45:03 Yeah, I think that's really good advice, and I agree you shouldn't tell people no. You should just give them the caution, give them your concerns, and then let them implement on a small scale. But yeah, practices move. We talked a fair bit about corn interseeding, and that tends to work better in lower-yielding corn because the canopy is not so tight. You start pushing over 300 bushel corn, all of a sudden the spring interseed really struggles because it won't get any sunlight. But if you're in an area that can produce that good of corn, you probably have more fall rainfall. So maybe now all of a sudden broadcasting in the fall works better, like in an August type setting when those leaves start to dry back a little bit. But that type of practice doesn't work very good out west if it's dryland because there won't be any moisture. So moving those things around, the idea of, hey, can I grow something with this is great. The principles move, but yeah, the practices you have to hone in. For sure.

45:53 Yeah, one of the other things that we've started doing, and we're continuing and do it this year, is going beyond just the visual observations of

46:04 You know, hey, how fast did it emerge? How fast did it grow? How good was it at weed control? We've started doing a lot of clippings and we've always done some clippings to determine biomass, but now we're doing clippings to determine the amount of nutrients and minerals that these different plants are taking up out of the soil. Because frankly, that's one of the main jobs of a cover crop is to produce, cycle, sequester nutrients and make them available for that next crop.

46:38 You know, maybe talk just a little bit about how we're collecting that data. You know, our ultimate goal is to have a really good robust data set, integrate that into the smart mix calculator. So then we can start letting someone have a goal of helping to cycle phosphorus or potassium or magnesium or any of these things. So we're just looking at how the different crops sequester and cycle these different nutrients.

47:09 Yeah, absolutely. This has been one of the newer things we're leaning into. We started in a big way last year and we've expanded upon it this year. Basically the idea, you know, trying to catch every plant around the start of their reproductive phase. So let them get all their vegetative growth done, go out there, take a fixed amount. We'd normally do a three foot by three foot square. Put that in a bag, take everything above the ground, put that in a bag, send it off to the lab, get a full analysis done on it. And it's a fairly expensive project because each of these tests is like another $30 to $50 depending on how premium the test is.

47:50 And then just physically pulling all these samples. I mean, like I mentioned, we do hundreds of plots and we're sampling all of these things. And I don't think we'll probably ever get to the point where we can say specifically, you know, sunflowers will pull up this amount of calcium because it's going to be context specific and soil system specific. But what we can say and what I think we'll get to the point where we can say is, hey, if you want to go after X nutrient, this plant is the best at pulling it up and bringing it into the plant. And more it's going to be about those comparisons between the plants. So not a total accumulation, but just, you know, sunflowers compared to buckwheat compared to radish compared to rye and just kind of setting up the evaluation in those terms.

48:36 And even just after one year, you know, we're seeing a lot of consistent trends. And as we build upon that, we'll gain confidence. You know, we sent some seed out to even some other folks to do some broader experiments, bring that data set back. We're testing our plots here, our different plots down in Kansas and elsewhere to really try to get comfortable. So it's probably going to be a little bit before we're really comfortable enough to share information. But there's something there, right? And already we're seeing the trends. The broad leaves tend to be the nutrient accumulators. The grasses tend to be your carbon. The brassicas tend to be heavy on the sulfur. The legumes obviously more on the nitrogen side. The sunflowers, the buckwheats, those tend to have higher accumulations of certain nutrients but not of others. And so it's been an interesting experiment. It's definitely one where I'm very thankful for interns because it's a lot of work.

49:30 You know, one of the cool things and we're not just looking at overall amounts of nutrients. We're looking at the percentage within that plant because so flax for example. Christine Jones for years has said, you know, she loves flax, one of her favorite plants. She always describes it as it punches above its weight. You know, because for being kind of a small plant, you know, a narrow stem, it's not ever going to be the biomass winner in anybody's plot. But she says it does something for your soil that no other plants do. And that's one of the things that, you know, in doing this and we need more data to confirm it but flax is always in the top of the percentage of a lot of these nutrients and not the overall amount because the biomass is relatively small.

50:22 But it's just really good at extracting these nutrients and so just things like that that can kind of put some data behind what a really smart person like Christine Jones says as we can kind of see this in the data as well.

50:37 Well, and it's interesting, you know, as well as I do, but

50:40 Especially just in the years I've been managing test spots, right? Like I'll plant a monoculture strip and I'll then I'll plant a mix beside it. It's like, dang it, that mix just looks better. And I like that the ochre in the mix looks better, the ochre in the monoculture. The sunflower in the mix looks better than the sunflower in the monoculture. Like that's a trend just always repeats. Like I'll plant a mix is like I just have the confidence to know that this is going to grow better because, you know, historically it does. By experience, I know that. Well, this is starting to put some data into it. Like, why do these plants perform better in a mix? Or why do the animals come off fatter off of the diverse mixes? You know, like these plants are doing different things and actually having some data to back it up of like, well, this is what they're doing, this is what this plant's doing, this is what this plant's doing, and this is why in community they grow better. It's definitely been an interesting experiment from that standpoint. And it'll be a little while before we like really start making confident statements from it, but something we're working on.

51:37 Yeah. Well, you know, one of our core values here at Green Cover is always growing. And it's a little bit of a play on words. We want our fields, we want your fields to always be growing something. That's that is how they're going to improve. But we're going to always be growing as a company, learning new things. And that's something we challenge each of our employees, each of our teammates. What are you learning today? What are you learning this week? What are your learning goals? And so these are just some of the things that we're doing as a company, as individuals to be always growing and to be learning. And I would challenge, you know, each of our customers, everybody that's listening to this, what are you doing, you know, in your own life, in your own operation to be always growing because, you know, there's no such thing as standing still. You're either moving forward or you're just going to get left behind. So I would just, you know, challenge people to do that. And one of the things you can do to always grow is come to one of these field days. And so, August 4th and 5th of this year, we'll be having our field days here at Blade. You can go to our website greencover.com. These are free. These summer field days are free. So come enjoy. We'll have really great regeneratively locally sourced food that we're going to be serving. We always pride ourselves on the quality of the food that we serve here. But Nathan, maybe just in closing here, in addition to, you know, kind of that cover crop petting zoo, all those monoculture plots, we there'll be the interseeding plots. What are some of the other things that people can expect to see if they come?

53:10 Yeah, so we'll have all the individual species out tours for that. We'll have a tour just about the interseeding, the tips, the tricks, the species that work. So we'll have a honed in look on the both the soybeans and the corn. We'll talk about livestock. You know, we've got the cattle here on the operation. We'll have a forage focus. We'll talk about management. We'll talk about like a forage chain, what you should graze when. This is when you need feed. This is what you can plant for that. So we'll have a forage focus. We'll talk about biology. You know, that's an everexpanding space in the in the regenerative soil health movement. You know, we'll talk about potential biological products, but mostly practices, you know, on the farm, composting, you know, practices that promote life instead of, you know, discouraging life. We'll talk about equipment. We'll talk about roller crimpers and no tail drills. It's really a smorgasboard of all sorts of different topics. It's you know last year we experimented with the kind of you pick schedule. So instead of saying everyone has to go through the rotation in this order, we just say hey here's the talks going at the different times. You pick what are you interested in? What do you want to hear about? You know we'll have a we'll have a food plot one. We'll have a you know garden homesteader type focus. Like we really want to make these field days for everyone, all levels of experience. So the most experienced producer can come and learn and the beginner can come and learn and not be overwhelmed, right? We want livestock, we want row crops, we want specialty crops, we want the food plotters, we want the homesteaders. We really want everyone to come attend and find value. So yeah, if it works in your schedule, we'd sure love to have them.

54:44 Yep. So just go to our website greenco.com and you can get all the information. You can sign up. Like I said, it's free and we would love to have you come. So Nathan, thank you so much, not only for joining us on the podcast. Thank you so much for all the great work that you're doing helping Green Cover be always growing so that we can help our customers be always growing as well. So, thank you everybody for listening to this episode of the Green Cover.