Best practices for cover cropping with Keith Berns, Co-Founder of Green Cover Seeds | Regen Rev 2022

We're going to switch gears now and turn our attention to cover crops. Keith burns combines over 20 years of no till farming with 10 years of teaching agriculture and communities. In addition to no till, no tilling, 2500 acres of irrigated and dry land, corn, soybeans, rye, tritical peas, sunflowers and buckwheat in south central Nebraska. He also co owns and operates Green Cover Seed, one of the major cover crop seed providers and educators in the United States. Through Green Cover Seed, Keith has experimented with over 100 different cover crop types and hundreds of mixes planted into various situations and has learned a great deal about COVID crops. Keith also developed the Smart Mix Calculator, one of the most widely used cover crop selection tools on the Internet. Keith has a master's degree in agricultural education from the University of Nebraska and teaches on cover crops and soil health and has done more than 20 times per year to various groups and audiences, including you all now. So please welcome Keith.

Okay, great. Thanks everybody. Let me share my screen here. Okay. It's my pleasure to be with you here. Coming to you from Green Cover Seed headquarters here in Nebraska. Just give you a little bit of background on our operation. We are in the south central part of Nebraska is where our main headquarters is. You can see a picture of it right there. We've been no tilling here for over 30 years. We're two thirds dry land and the third irrigated in kind of a traditional rotation. Corn, beans, and some sort of cereal. But once we started down the path to soil health, we started adding all these other crops. Rye, triticale, oats, et cetera, et cetera. This is what we want our crops to look like. We want to never see our soil unless we go looking for it. So we want to have the maximum amount of COVID when we plant. We don't even want to be able to see where the planter ran. We want it 100% covered. We started experimenting with COVID crops about 14 years ago, and we started green cover seed in 2009. You can kind of see a picture of all of the things that we built in response to the growing cover crop seed industry. One of the cool things that we've been able to do over the years is have associations with lots of other companies, lots of other organizations. The Soil Health Institute. If you've never watched this film, the Living Soil film, I would encourage you to watch it. It's free. You can watch it on YouTube. It's been watched over 3 million times. But the Soil Health Institute came to us and they said, hey, we want to make a documentary about soil health and cover crops and, and we want to video you taking your seeding equipment to the field at the same time you're harvesting. So I said, great, come on out. We're doing that. We're harvesting corn. We're going to be planting cover crops. So they did, they sent their film crew out. I just wanted to kind of share this here with you because I, you know, they sent this Doug film crew out, real professional. They had this really cool drone. So I hooked up the big tractor, four wheel drive tractor to the air cedar and I jumped in. It's this beautiful afternoon in October. I jumped in and was headed down the field and was, you know, gearing up and you know, going faster and faster, thinking, man, this is going to be great. You know, we're going to be on film, we're going to be famous. And just about the time that you think, man, things couldn't hardly get any better than this. Something like this happens where the wheels literally fall off. And so you have to be careful about getting a little too cocky or too confident in where you're going, because God has a way of humbling you. So I show that to tell everybody that we're real farmers because things like that happen to us as well. So what I want to talk to you about this afternoon is post harvest cover crops. Cover crops planted after you harvest your main cash crop. And that might be corn or it might be wheat or beans, or it could be a fruit or nut or a specialty type thing. We work with all facets of those people. So I'm just going to take you through some of the theory, some of the, some of the questions that we have to get answered or that we ask our customers before we help them make a cover crop mix. And so basically, if you're going to plant a cover crop after harvest, you have to answer these questions. You know, why are you doing it, when are you doing it, where are you doing it, how are you doing it? And what's coming next? Because those things all play into what is going to be the best cover crop mix for your situation. So just going to take you through these questions. I got a couple examples at the end of the talk showing how we would build a mix for a couple of these scenarios. And then we'll obviously take some questions as well. So first of all, and whether you're doing a post harvest cover crop or a pre harvest cover crop or an inner cover crop, you should always ask, why never plant a cover crop Unless you know what you're trying to accomplish. So what are the goals for your cover crop? And there's a lot of different ones that you can accomplish. You can, you can boost your biology. You know, Steve and Dennis did a great job talking in the previous talk about all of the biology that these plants are supporting. And the mycorrhiza fungi, which is pictured right there in the middle, you can see that hyphen network starting to go out and explore the soil. Cover crops are one of the absolute best ways for boosting the biology of your soil because they're providing such a great and consistent food source. Those liquid carbon red exudates are feeding the biology. And it's one of the best ways to boost the biology in your soil. And so if your soils don't have a lot of earthworm activity, get some cover crops out there, because cover crops will certainly help do that. So that's definitely one of the main reasons that we do it. But some people do it for a little more traditional reasons, erosion prevention. Again, here's this picture of this cornfield. This is one of our fields. And again, there's no erosion that's going to occur on this field. Even if I get a really big heavy rain because all of that residue is breaking the impact of the raindrops, all of that residue is helping that rainfall soak in. I'm going to get very little runoff. It can blow as hard as it wants to. That residue is not going anywhere because it's still attached. This was wheat stubble from the previous year. We planted a cover crop into it and we just let the winter kill it. So it's not mowed, it's not chopped. It can blow as hard as it wants to. And that stuff's not moving because it's still anchored in. So erosion prevention is a really big reason why a lot of people plant cover crops. Weed control is another great one. Here's a picture from one of our fields. In the background you can see where we had cereal rye cover crop. Now this is, this has corn coming up in it. I don't know how well you can see it right here. There's corn coming up in these rows. This picture was taken the first part of June and we had some experiments where we planted into really tall growing rye and there's corn coming back in this rye here as well. We'd sprayed the rye out later. No marestail weeds whatsoever. Zero mare's tail back where all this cover crop rye was, where the, where the plants are skipped or where the drill Skip planting cover crops the previous fall. I've got Marestail all over the place. And so weed control can really be accomplished very effectively with COVID crops when done properly. Here's another picture. This is from one of our clients fields, not one of ours. These are soybeans. Coming up again in cover crop rye, where the soybeans had the right cover crop, almost no weeds, and there had not been a post spray application yet. As you can see over here where there was no cover crops. There's no shortage of a weed bank in this field. And so you can just see right to the line how effective those cover crops are at suppressing weeds. And again, this is the soybeans planted in here. But you have to start this by planting it prior to the last crop. Nitrogen fixation can be another really important reason for planting cover crops, especially with the cost of nitrogen fertilizer. Right now, you know, we're talking lots and lots of money. This is from one of our clients here in Nebraska. His setup, he plants hairy vetch. He's an organic producer, plantary vetch. He lets it grow to mid bloom, rolls it down on the front, plants his corn on the back. And he has some really, really nice looking organic corn, very high producing. How much nitrogen can you fix? Well, these are some experiments we ran last year. We pulled these tests in the spring of 21. Cover crops were planted October 1st in 2020, and we pulled the samples June 1st. So this basically is growing October to June, 30 pounds of rye, 15 pounds of hairy vetch planted in October, harvested in June, 134 pounds of nitrogen in that. You know, pretty good for having a bunch of rye out there as well as vetch. Here's one where it's just straight au merit hairy vetch, 217 pounds of nitrogen per acre, again planted in October, growing till June in southern Nebraska. And then the winter peas. This is 70 pounds of Wyo winter peas, a new variety of winter peas out of the University of Wyoming. And this is had incredible growth on these winter peas. They look beautiful. Three tons of dry matter and 242 pounds of nitrogen produced. So can we do that every year? Not every year probably, but most years. If we're willing to let it grow, we're going to be able to produce a lot of nitrogen even when some of these legumes are planted a little later into the season. Now maybe you don't want to fix your nitrogen because maybe you're coming in with soybeans or maybe you've got a lot of excess Nitrogen out your field already. A really good reason for planting a cover crop would be to cycle and make other nutrients available. So in this example here, we've got soybeans coming up through my cereal rye. Soybeans planted into cereal rye is the absolute easiest way to start cover cropping. If you're in a row crop type rotation, the cereal rye is going to tie up and sequester that nitrogen for a period of time, forces the soybeans to nodulate and really recruit the rhizobia bacteria to start producing the nitrogen. And then as the cereal rye starts to decompose and break down later in the season, it releases that nitrogen, but only after the beans have already nodulated and already really off to the races. So we get a lot of benefit there. Again, we can do the same thing with corn. This is corn planted into wheat stubble. I like this picture because this, this corn plant is coming right up through this, this old radish carcass right here from the previous year. That radish carcass is just chock full of nitrogen. Radish is a great scavenger of nitrogen. And so this thing is chock full of nitrogen. And this corn plant is going to be sucking all that nitrogen up because that it and it's not lost. If I had a wet spring, some of that nitrogen could have been leached. But in this example, my nitrogen was tied up in this residue and as it breaks down, it releases it for my corn crop. Another reason is beneficial in pollinator insect habitat and forage. Again, Steve and Dennis talked about some of the beneficial insects that plants can recruit, that can call in, they can signal which is, which is just so cool. It's fantastic how they can do that. But if you have no beneficial insects anywhere close, those plants can do all the signaling. They want to bring in a predator insect and nobody's going to be there to hear it. So we need to create an environment that supports these beneficial insects and recruits them and has them there so when the plant needs them, they can come. And it's not just in corn and soybeans as well. You know, here's a mustard plant in an almond orchard, you know, that is hosting and recruiting honeybees. And this is a phacelia plant. These things can be done in just about any application. And there's different plants that will flower at different times of the year. And the key here, especially in the orchards and vineyards, we want to get these things flowering prior to our cash crop flowering. So we've got our pollinators Already recruited prior to the trees needing it. Compaction and infiltration issues would be another reason here. So you got annual ryegrass here on the left. We got a big old nitro radish or a tillage radish here. We can do lots of good things for reducing compaction, increasing our infiltration issues with COVID crops because we've got that root growing in the ground. And then lastly, and again, this is, this is a very important one for anybody that's got livestock. You can grow tremendous amounts of supplemental forage. In periods of time when nothing else is really happening out there, you can grow a lot of supplemental forage. Some people are doing this as their main crop. Some people are taking the supplemental forage in between periods of cash cropping. But you can grow lots and lots of tons of very, very high quality forage for your animals. So that's kind of the why, those are the different reasons why you would plant. And based on which one of those reasons you chose, it's going to affect which species you're going to use to try to accomplish those goals. So the next question is when? When can you plant the COVID crop? Timing is so important, especially if you're talking about a fall harvested cover crop. You know, how much growing season do you have left? We like to say, you know, here in Nebraska anyway, that every day that a cover crop can grow in September is worth two days of growing in October. And every day it can grow in October is worth two days of growing in November. So if, if I lose the last week of September, it's not like I just lost seven days of growing, it's more like I lost two weeks of growing because that has the most heat units of the whole rest of the year. So timing is everything. You have to be ready to go, you have to have your seed, you have to have your equipment, you have to be ready to get out there and get going. Do you have irrigation? Can you help irrigate it up to get it started? Can you plant pre post harvest? You know, in other words, can you get it out there before you actually harvest? When and how are you going to terminate it? You know that's going to make a difference in when you plant it as well, because it makes a difference in the maturity of how you're going to terminate it. And one of the things is you can just find the most cold, hardy varieties on the market. If you plant late, then you have to have the right varieties that can handle that cold weather, that can germinate in cool soils, that can make it through tough winters and be there to grow for you in the spring. So selecting the right varieties based on when you're planting is very important as well. The third question is how, how are you going to plant these things? Are you drilling it? Are you broadcasting it? Again, it makes a difference not only in what you use, but but the seeding rates that you're going to use as well. If you're broadcasting, do you have a way to help get that seed to soil contact with some sort of affirming device or some sort of incorporation? And how can you take advantage of every fall day possible if the growing season is limited? Again, every day in September is worth two days in October. How can I get that seed out there as quickly as possible? Here's just a few things that people have done. So I wanted to show this picture just to show you that after pulling my air cedar out of the ditch and fixing it and putting the right hitch pin in, I did get out to the field. This is some, some of the video from that licking soil film. So one of the what we do is we just try to chase the combine with our air seeder and try to get that cover crop planted. Absolutely. As soon as possible after harvest. Because again, we don't want to lose any days. Some people have gotten pretty creative. If they have maybe less labor, they're actually seeding with their combine. This is a Gandhi box mounted on the combine and they're blowing seed right down underneath the header here. And then it's being covered up by the residue in the back. This would be an example of a pre post harvest or using a highboy rig of some sort. They're coming in and blowing cover crop seed. These drops are getting the seed down to the ground. So the seeds not getting tied up here in the leaves and it's allowing that cover crop seed to actually start before harvest. And then again, there's just lots of different ways of doing this. These are some methods that people are using earlier on at corn. Either spreading and beans here at leaf Yellow or putting this on at V4 in corn or this dawn duo seed here is actually getting the seed into the ground. And again that's being done at V4. So lots of different ways to get it out there. But again, a lot of it goes back to what your goals are and, and how you're going to do it. So I'm continually amazed at the creativeness of the American farmer of how they find ways to get things done if they really need to and want to. The next question Is what, what is your next crop going to be? We don't want to do harm to the next crop, so we should be as different as possible from the following crop. So, you know, in other words, if I'm planting soybeans next, I wouldn't want to have a whole bunch of winter peas out there as my cover crop. Number one, I' need the nitrogen from that pea production. But number two, soybeans and peas are both legumes or both fabaceas. It's they're in the same plant family, there's more risk of having the disease carryover, having some sort of pest issue. When I have the same plant family that's out there, I'm better off having cereal rye, which is a grass, much better off having that out there ahead of the soybeans, because now they're completely different plant families. Now, I say that, but we oftentimes will plant corn into cereal rye. And it is more tricky, it's more difficult. There's lots more management things that have to happen. There's much more concerns. But sometimes at that time of the year, that's about one of the only things that is going to work. So there are times when we aren't able to have a really different cover crop from our cash crop, but whenever possible, we don't want to do that. And so I tell people this all the time as well. Soybeans are a great cover crop for anybody who's not growing any soybeans in their cash crop rotation. We would never want to use soybeans as a cover crop or corn as a cover crop. If you're growing corn and beans in your rotation. If you're not growing those, they make great cover crops. They're relatively inexpensive. We know they grow well, so they're really good options. But try to have it as different as possible from your cash crop. And so once you've kind of answered all those questions, then you have to start going, okay, so what cover crop mixes? What, you know, what species can I put into my mixes? You know, we've set our company up from the very beginning to really focus on diversity, because if soil health is our goal, then crop diversity cannot be ignored or overstated. You know, as, again, as Steve and Dennis showed, you know, plants are pretty amazing creations, and they're really created to grow in diverse ecosystems. They're never really made to grow in a monoculture system. System, because resilience from a system comes from the diversity that is in the system. We want a diverse cover crop mix because we Want a balanced diet for that soil biology that I showed you and then we talked about? And if I only have one type of COVID crop growing out there, I'm probably doing great things for one segment of my soil biology, but I'm leaving other parts of the soil biology, probably hungry, probably feeling a little left out because I'm not getting the right root exudates out there for them. So diversity will give you that balanced diet, and it's going to support a more diverse soil biology. And we want balance because even good things like a legume or a brassica, when not used in moderated balance, they can be harmful. And so diversity is really hard to get into our cropping systems through our cash crops. Because when we do diverse cash crops, for each of those cash crops, we need to have specialized equipment, specialized knowledge, and specialized markets. If you're going to market, you know, if you're going to grow 6, 7, 8 different cash crops now. But cover crops are the perfect way to add diversity to your system, because you don't have to have specialized equipment. You can just go plan it with a grain drill. Some people just broadcast it. You don't have to have specialized knowledge. You just get the seed out there and let it grow. And there are no markets for it, because the market for what you grow as a cover crop is your soil biology. It's all going back into the soil. It's for building the soil. And so it's really an easy way that you can put diversity, inject diversity into your system without having the complexity of trying to harvest and market and grow some specialty crops like that. Now, we love diversity, but there are a couple caveats that I always need to make sure that I cover here. And it kind of goes back to some of these pictures that we had. The more specific your goals or concerns are, the less diverse your mixes will typically be. So in this example here, my organic farmer friend here in Nebraska, his number one goal, because he's trying to grow 200 bushel irrigated organic corn and he has no other sources of nitrogen. His number one goal, his overriding concern is I have to produce as much nitrogen as I possibly can. Okay, that, that, that's a great goal. It's a very worthy goal. So his strategy here is not to have a bunch of cereal rye out there, because cereal rye is going to be sequestering nitrogen, not producing nitrogen. His goal is to produce nitrogen. So he is planting 40 pounds of hairy vetch and he's growing 200 pounds of nitrogen. So it's A very specific goal. It's a. It's not a very diverse mix. Is that okay? Yes, it's absolutely okay. Because what he's chosen is meeting the goal that he has set, and that's really what's important. You know, from an economic farm standpoint, you need to choose the right things to accomplish the goal. Now, if he came to me and said, well, my overall goal is, you know, soil health, and I want to build organic matter, yeah, we would have had some hairy veg, but we would add some rye and maybe some clover and some rapeseed. We would have made this more diverse. It would have produced less nitrogen, but it would have had more additional benefits as well. Here's another example of where it's difficult to get diversity into your system. The tighter your planting window, the fewer species will work, and thus the less diverse your mixes will be. We see this all the time. And this is the reason why cereal rye is the number one cover crop in the United States, is because so many acres are planted later in the fall. Cereal rye is the only thing that makes sense. Cereal rye will germinate at 34 degrees. And so you can plant it, you know, here in Nebraska, we can plant it all the way through November and even into early part of December, if the ground's not frozen solid. I can plant it so late and it still make it work. But nothing else really makes sense to be planted that late. So the tighter your planting window, the fewer species will work. But that's okay. Having a cereal rye cover crop by itself is way better than having no cover crop at all. So you just got to keep those things in mind. We don't want to just throw diversity out there if it doesn't make any sense or if it doesn't have a good chance of working. So saying all those things, it sounds really complicated. And they're. It. It's. I. I like to tell people it's not. It's not complicated, but it can be very complex. And that's, you know, God's creation is not complicated, but it's very complex. There's. There's lots of things that you have to know and kind of understand and get everything to fit right. So we've created an online tool. We use this all the time for our own use. It's completely free for people to use. You can just go to our website there@greencoverseed.com you can sign up for a totally free account. It's called our Smart Mix Calculator. And the way it works is when you get in here, you'll have an account, and you can change your account to whatever you want. So I'm. This is an example of me making a mix for a customer in central Kansas, Salina, Kansas, coming in after wheat harvest. I was just going to walk you through this example, so I put in the zip code of 67401. It says, hello, Salina, Kansas. It knows that Salina, Kansas, your average annual rainfall is 31 inches. Your first frost is October 25th. Your last frost is April 14th, and your plant hardiness zone is 6A. And it uses the. So the calculator knows all this information for all 54,000 US zip codes. And it's using that to help you narrow down what the best species for what you're trying to accomplish is. You can give your mix a name, you tell it how many acres you want to plant. But here's the really important part. Down here, it is going to force you to choose goals. You have to have at least one goal for what you want to accomplish. It will not let you go pick species until you have a goal. And just like, if you call in, we're not going to make a recommendation until we know what you want to accomplish. So in this example, they want to increase soil organic matter, they want supplemental grazing, and they want nutrient cycling. They're going to plant it July 12th is what we're estimating. And they're just going to let the frost terminate it. So we put November 30th here. So when you go in, then you can pick the species and it categorizes them. So it says, here's the things that are excellent. There's going to be some things that are good, there's going to be some things that are marginalized, and then there's usually some things that are risky here as well. And so now I can go through and I can say, okay, well, I want some cow peas, and I want some sorghum, and I want some sunflowers. I can just click the boxes. Tells me how much each one costs. It tells me the full seating rate, all this. And here's. Here's kind of a cool little thing. And this is just a screenshot, so I can't show you this, but these little play button icons right here, if you don't know what a cowpea is, if you click on this button, it'll pop up a YouTube video window and it will be Dale Strickler and myself out in our plots. And we'll spend two or three minutes talking about cow Peas. And so you can just click on each one of these little icons and it takes you right through instructional videos, if you will. So this is what it looks like after I've selected the different species that I wanted. And there's tons of complexity in the back end of this that I don't really have time to show. I would encourage you, if you get a chance, to go in and create your free account and you can try it. But in this, in this scenario, I'm at 90%. The program has said you're doing pretty good. You're at 90% towards your goal of increasing organic matter. 90% for supplemental grazing. I'm only 50% on nutrient cycling. I'm not nearly as worried if my third goal isn't as high. But these first two better be pretty high or I need to go back and change some things to try to get that higher. Down here, it's telling me what my estimated C to N ratio is, my percentage of a full rate. And then down here, it's giving me scores for different calculations like nitrogen fixation and grazing and drought and all these others. On the right hand side, it tells me exactly what this mix is going to cost. This is going to cost me $35.22 an acre. And it tells me tons and tons of information. So lots of information there that you can get and you can look at. I'm going to skip this one. And we'll go to this as my last example here. This is one from California. So we're coming in after Ammon harvest here. We do have quite a few orchard and vineyard customers. And so we're saying, okay, we're harvesting almonds, we're going to come in, we're going to plant a cover crop. After that, our goal is just to attract beneficial insects. We want to increase soil organic matter and we want to cycle nutrients. So when we do that. And again, I'm not showing you what I'm choosing, I'm just showing you what I've already chosen. So I've got lots of different things here. I've chosen things that I know are going to flower. I've chosen things that I know are going to build my soil. I've chosen things that I know are going to survive some frost out there because even though it's not cold like Nebraska, we know that we can still get nipped off a little bit. So I've chosen things that I think are going to work here. Again, we can see all sorts of information here about, you know, how many legumes how many grasses? How many brassicas? Of course, the all important one. What is this mix going to cost? Well, this one is $47 an acre. The customer may come back and say, well, you know, I only had about $40 in my budget. What can we do? So I can come back to this and you can play with your numbers and kind of tweak some things up and some things down to get it to where you want it to be. So anyway, that's, that's, that would be how we put mixes together for people. And that tool is out there. It's completely free for anybody who wants to use it. They can use that. Just one other resource I want to direct your attention to. We put out a soil health resource guide every year. This is the latest one. The version 8 is 84 pages. Beautiful pictures, color pictures. We, most of the articles are written by other people. You know, John Kemp has written articles in here. Gabe Brown, Ray Archuleta, Christine Jones, Nicole Masters are just to name a few. So these are all available to download for free. Again, just go to our website. You can download PDF copies or we'll send you free copies. We print 25 to 30,000 of these every year and our goal is to give them all away for free. So if you want free copies, you can email me or you can go onto the website here and you can request that. And we'd be more than happy to send those out. So that is my presentation. I think that, let's see, get out of sharing here. There we go. Do we have some questions?

We do. Keith, thank you so much for that. We have a bunch of questions and we have about 10 minutes to get through them. So I will keep going with those. Russ wants to know if there's any information or experience on intercropping corn soy in the US with COVID crops. It seems to be the next step in the logical progression of increasing diversity in agriculture.

So there's a question about growing corn and soybeans together.

It says intercropping corn soy in the US with COVID crops.

Yeah, so. So I think, yeah, they're one of the hottest topics right now in regenerative ag is polycropping, growing multiple crops together, harvesting them, separating them out, and then selling them as two cash crops. And that, that is one way to do it. The other way is just you simply using the soybeans as a cover crop to help produce nitrogen to feed the corn. So there's been lots of different things done around those lines. I don't know if there's been, you know, super great, you know, replicated type experiments. Part of the problem with polycropping and really with a lot of these regenerative techniques, it's so hard for a university to separate one variable to really get good research on. And so oftentimes what you'll see is more anecdotal evidence. Practical Farmers of Iowa is a great organization. You can go to their website, they've got lots of good farmer type research on this and they've got, you know, everything from narrow row corn to wide row corn to some of these inter seeded type things. So what I always suggest people to do is try it. You don't know unless you try. But you don't have to try it on the whole farm. Try it on a relatively small area, see how it works. And if you're just doing it as a cover crop, again, I wouldn't use soybeans. If you got soybeans in your cash cropping rotation, use, use a cow pea, use a mung bean. There are other things that you can use that still give you a break away from your next soybean crop that you grow.

Great, that makes sense. Quick question here. Philip wants to know if you have a fallow year.

Do we have a fallow year? We don't in our rotation. And I know that people do have fallow years. And the fallacy about fallow should be a lot of people think fallow is nothing growing, and that's the worst thing you can possibly do for your soil. A fallow year to me should be a year where you're no longer harvesting and hauling away the produce of the field, but you're letting it all cycle back into your system. So if you want to do a fallow year, and a lot of times people will do what they call a regen year where they're growing something, they may graze it, they may just let it, you know, biodegrade back into the soil. Never do a fallow year where nothing is growing because you will absolutely starve your soil. You'll destroy your soil biology and you will set yourself backwards many, many years of what you've tried to accomplish.

Thank you for that. Okay, any idea which cover crop species is best at activating calcium?

Activating calcium? That's a good question. You know, Ray Ward and I, we did some experiments with. What we found is, it wasn't so much about the, the, the specific cover crops, but the broadleaf type crops. You know, the sunflowers, the, the cow peas, the things that tend to have deeper tap Roots, we found them to bring calcium up from deeper levels, calcium that had leached down maybe below where a lot of the grass roots are. What Ray found when he was doing a lot of the testing on that is that those broadleaf based cover crop mixes were bringing more cal calcium up, back up to the soil surface than were grass based mixes. And so I think that if you use a higher rate of broadleaf plants, especially deep tap rooted ones, you know, the sunflowers, the radishes, things like that, that have the deep tap root have the ability to translocate more nutrients, you'll bring up some of that deeper calcium and redeposit it up on top. Is it going to change your PH significantly? No, probably not. Can it help? Certainly it's all going to help, but that's what we've really seen is those deeper rooted crops having more effectiveness there.

Great. That makes, makes sense. Have you experienced any issues with soil motion, excuse me, with soil moisture, using cover crops?

Well, soil moisture is always a concern. And in fact, before we started green cover seed, you know, we're here in Nebraska, we get about 25 inches of moisture. Our biggest fear was if we planted a cover crop, we would use our moisture in our wheat stubble and we would hurt the corn crop for the next year, because that's our big thing. We plant dryland corn into wheat stubble from the previous year. We know we can add 20 or 30 bushels of corn because we can bank that moisture. And so we didn't want to, we didn't want to mess that up. And, and so before we started your green cover seed, we had a small Sarah Grant we got a few thousand dollars to buy moisture sensors, and so we had those out in the field, you know, at 1 foot, 2 foot and 3 foot levels. And what we found across the board is that the COVID crops are using moisture for sure. But every single time we looked at it, when things were in a diverse mix, it used considerably less moisture, used the moisture much more efficiently than when any of those things were growing in individual monoculture plots. And so we found that the diverse mixes were much more efficient at using moisture and, and they recovered much quicker because of better infiltration and less evaporation. So once we did that, we really weren't worried about the moisture usage thing as long as we had sufficient recovery time. Now, you can't go out in western Nebraska or eastern Colorado and grow the big vetch cover crop, roll it down, plant corn into it, and expect that to work in a dry land situation. I mean, that Just would be foolish. You have to understand your environment, you have to understand the context and you have to allow for the recovery time. On the other hand, if you're too wet, if moisture, soil moisture, too much is a problem. You know, the lots and lots of people are planting green. They're letting their cover crop, whether it be vetch or rye or rye grass, whatever it is, they're letting it grow until they plant the next cash crop into it. Because as that cover crop is growing, it's keeping the top part of that moisture, soil moisture profile kind of dried out a little bit. You've got that great root thatch. It's like a sod. And you, it has good traffic ability and you can plant into that. And then once you get planted, then you can terminate your cover crop. So you can use cover crops to either conserve moisture or get rid of moisture. It's all about how you manage it.

Okay, And I think along similar lines here, these are moving a little bit. We were wondering about or if you have any hints on how to amend soil structure using cover crops.

How to amend soil structure using cover crops. Well, I mean, if you use cover crops, you're going to improve your soil structure, you know, in a number of ways. Number one, just by keeping it covered, you know, you're going to keep it cooler. You're, you know, again, like Steve and Dennis were saying, you know, when, when you get too hot, things just stop working. And so by keeping it covered and cooler, you're going to have to let the biology work better. You've got the roots going down into the soil, opening up more macro pores. You're hosting biology that is going to have lots of additional soil glues, you know, the glomerulans that are going to help hold that together. And then cover crops, you know, probably one of the biggest things they do is they're putting those liquid root exudates into the soil. That carbon source pumping into the soil is going to build soil faster than just about anything else. So everything you do with COVID crops is going to help build soil structure. Just don't go out, you know. And this is what drives me nuts. People will plant a cover crop and then they'll go out there with a big disc and just disc it all up. But you kind of just, you know, all the benefits that, you know, soil benefits that you got, you, you kind of just disturbed a lot of them. So there's trade offs. But certainly cover crops can help build soil structure very quickly and very efficiently.

Great, thank you. And I Will finish with one last question here. And Nick says that he has heard cover crop experts say, if you want to grow protozoa, plant, field piece. Does this have any validity?

I don't know. Certainly feel, you know, there's something magical about field peas. Because every time we've had people grow field peas as a cash crop, whether they're following that with wheat or whether they're following that with corn, we get people all the time that say, that was the best wheat crop we've ever had following those. And that was. That was this monoculture field pea crop taken out for. For grain harvest. And I've heard that the statement said about wheat and about corn, is it the protozoa, is it the nitrogen? I. I don't know. I'm not smart enough to know exactly what it is. But I have heard numerous people say there's something that peas are doing to the soil that are really setting it up for great success for that next crop. Now, with that being said, do you have to grow peas as a cash crop to accomplish that? No. Peas are a great fit in a cover crop mix. You know, we have both spring peas and winter peas, so you can plant them spring and fall. So I don't know if they're. They're doing better for protozoa than anything else, but they're doing great things to the soil and the biology.

Great. Well, thank you so much, Keith. This was very, very informative. I know there were some questions that we didn't get to, so I encourage those folks that have those questions to make sure they follow up with you directly. And thank you.

Yeah, that'll be good because I will not be able to make it to the speaker deal at the end. So sorry about that. My email was up there. You can post it in the chat. Email me the questions, be happy to respond.

Perfect. We will get that into the chat. And thank you again, Keith. Wonderful information.

Thanks, everybody.