15 Common Cover Crop Questions Answered

0:00 It's 5:30. Thank you guys for showing up this evening for sticking with us. This is our 13th webinar. We've got one more that we're gonna do next week and we're gonna kind of wrap up this season, so this will be the second to last one that we're gonna do here for now.

0:16 What we wanted to do this week was kind of talk about some of the frequently asked questions that we get, some that wouldn't constitute doing a whole webinar for but are just kind of quick hitters that we can answer within three to five minutes. So I do have a pretty long list of questions as the sales team and we kind of put together on what we get asked the most. But if you guys have questions that we don't cover, we will leave some time at the end for you guys to ask those in the chat bar. So go ahead, if you're also watching on Facebook you can comment on Facebook as well and I'll try to get to those so that Keith and Dale can answer that.

0:53 I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of kick us right off. What I'll probably do is again we're gonna jump all over tonight just because we're gonna hit a lot of different topics. So one of the first things we're gonna hit is more of the logistics side of Green Cover Seed. One of the big questions we get is, do you guys work with the small guys? So Keith and Dale, thanks for joining us tonight. Why don't you guys start off with how do we work with the small guy?

1:19 Well, first of all, no, there are no small soil health people, only small problems to solve, right? So yeah, we do kind of take pride in the fact that we do work with everybody. We have an online presence or internet store we call it the smart store. We sell one pound, two pound seed to people all the time and it's probably best handled on the smart store. You can get on greenccoverseed.com and you can order one pound of anything that you want and we'll ship that right out to you. You can handle the payment everything right online, doing that. So that may take care of some of what you're wanting to do if you're smaller. We do also have some pre-made mixes. We tend to not necessarily encourage a lot of that because we do like to customize mixes for the individual customer's needs. But you know, if you have a garden and just have a half an acre or a little parcel, you don't need a whole truck's worth of a mix. So then we do have ten or twelve different pre-made mixes and we make those available. You can buy those in as small as one-pound quantities as well. And so that will help take care of a lot of the gardeners. And then we do on their smart mix calculator, we do have a one-acre minimum on the smart mix calculator because it's just a lot of work to do that and we just can't afford to do that for a three hundred square foot parcel. So that's why we do have those other ones, but you can make one-acre mixes on the smart mix calculator and we will mix that up according to your specifications and requirements and send that out. So yes, we work with people of all varying backgrounds and sizes and we try to give as good customer service as we can to everybody.

3:22 Dale, do you wanna make any comments on that? I think he covered it pretty well. And one of the questions that I get a lot is can I order additional seed and how long will that store? So I do have people that will order extra seed to meet that one-acre minimum and I'll use that same seed for... Yeah, how long do you guys typically say that the seed would last on a mix?

3:50 It all depends on how you store it. You know, if you've got a relatively small amount of seed, keeping it cool, even putting it in the freezer, the seed warehouse where they're keeping the seed library of the world, those are in cold storage. So the cooler you can keep it, the longer it will last. But even if you, the main thing is keep the mice out of it. So put it in some sort of sealed plastic container, keep it out of the sun, keep it in your house so it stays cool. One little trick that you can do is get a little bit of diatomaceous earth and sprinkle in your seed mix and that will keep bugs from coming in there because it's a really good natural bug deterrent. It's not a chemical. It's very powderized fossil shells.

4:42 Really deters insects, so if you're going to do long term storage, look for a little bit of diatomaceous earth to put in there. Keep it sealed up, keep it dry, keep it cool. A year, easy two years, three years — I've seen tests on some of the brassicas, radishes, turnips, things like that, that five, six years out they're still over 90% germ. Not everything will do that. I wouldn't, as a general rule, encourage people to store stuff more than a couple of years, and then only if you've really got it sealed up good.

5:16 Diatomaceous earth is actually fairly easy to come by. There's a lot of brand names, a lot of household insecticides — not like Raid the stuff you spray, but the insecticide powders that you might put in the house. The active ingredient for some of those are diatomaceous earth, and we actually have that on an angle. If you're wanting to store something long-term, ask us. We can probably throw a little bit of that in for you too.

5:51 So speaking of throwing a little bit of that in, do we often get the question: do we pre-inoculate everything that we have in our mixes? So how do we handle inoculant?

6:05 That's always a good question. We do pre-inoculate some things. The things we're hesitant to do that on — a lot of that depends on number one what it is, and number two how long it's going to be before you plant. So there's quite a spectrum of how viable inoculants are. All the way from like our clovers and alfalfa that we inoculate — that inoculant is encapsulated in clay. That stuff's good for 18 months on the seed. That's what the label says. It's very long-lasting, so we are pre-coding that. And it's not really a coding, it's just a dry powder, but it's clay-based, and so that's stuff lasts for a long, long time.

6:45 The other end of that extreme is the pea, lentil, and betcha rhizobia. It is very — when people — it does not last very long. And so we're more hesitant to put that on the seed if you're telling us it's going to be very long before you get it in the ground. We do have some products that have some extenders in it that will extend the life of that pea, lentil, and betcha. And so we can stretch that out a little bit longer.

7:13 The cowpea type is a little more hardy than the pea, little batch, and then the soybean rhizobia are very hardy. They'll last for several weeks on the seed. So it kind of depends again on what you're doing, how long it's gonna be. If it's the cool part of the year they'll last much longer than if it's the hot part of the year. And so we'll try to work with the customer and find out. If we know it is gonna be several weeks before they plant, we'll really encourage them to not mix it in, but to ship it on the side.

7:45 Sometimes what I'll do — to kind of play both sides of it a little bit — we'll make some end. Because the inoculants that have the extenders in them also cost more, so I'll maybe mix in a partial rate of that and then send some of the cheaper stuff, still sealed up in the bag, along with the seed. And have the customer put that on as they're going into the drill. So there's some that's mixed in and there's some that's not, so you kind of get the best of both worlds there, a little bit.

8:13 So that kind of covers the rhizobial. Dale, why don't you talk a little bit about the bio-azo and the mycorrhizae, because they're a little bit different products, and maybe even the hyper-girl compost extract?

8:24 Sure. The bio-azo is a blend of an azospirillum and azotobacter, which are free-living nitrogen fixers. They can fix nitrogen on the roots of sorghum, corn, millet. It's basically just about any plant that has root exudates — which I believe all of them can feed either spirillum and azotobacter. They really thrive on warm season grasses because those are really high root exudates producing organisms or plants that can nourish these organisms. They don't fix a lot of nitrogen, but in a grass-legume mix where you're not putting nitrogen fertilizer out there, every little additional bit counts.

9:19 Something I really have seen some good results from is longevity on seed of the bio-azo. The label says about 30 days. It's more hardy than most of our rhizobium bacteria — our peat-based type rhizobium, which might last, you know, a week depending on the organism. Bio-azo is definitely harder than that, but again, it's a living.

9:51 Organism since we break the bag it starts dying. So even though it's harder than the Rhizobium bacteria, we still want to see you get it in the ground on fairly timely manner. The mycorrhizal fungi on the other hand, those spores, I mean they have a hard capsule on them. They are very persistent. They can last a couple years on the seed with basically no loss of viability, and then they lose about 10% viability every year after that.

10:30 First mycorrhizal fungi I ever inoculated with was 5-year-old product and it worked fantastic. If it hadn't worked, I wouldn't be pitching it now today. That's what started my whole journey. Someone gave me some stuff for free because it expired, and anybody that knows me knows I'm one of the biggest cheapskates on the planet, and free speaks to me. So yeah, if it's free, I'll try it. I know a lot about mycorrhizal fungi that I didn't want to pay for it, and I'm sure glad I got that material because it was very impressive. Results within 30-60 days, there was just a noticeable difference.

11:23 Mycorrhizal fungi is very, very durable. Unlike Rhizobium, Keith was talking about temperature, ultraviolet light kills Rhizobium. Temperatures over about 110, 120 degrees kill Rhizobium, and they're pretty fragile. Mycorrhizal fungi on the other hand, those spores can take up to 140 degrees. It can take direct sunlight. They can even take fertilizer contact. You can mix it with fertilizer, which is another weird thing. You can actually mix it with fungicide and it won't kill the spores because it doesn't penetrate that shell. Not advisable, but it can handle it.

12:13 Mycorrhizal fungi, you can spread it on the soil surface. They can sit there in the sun for a year, and you catch a rain, work it in the ground. It's still good. They're tough.

12:26 On our seed and on those inoculants, are those organic? Do we have organic seed? That's something we get quite often. We do work with a lot of organic growers. I'm happy to do that. There's more and more all the time. I think more people are transitioning to that. Our seed is not certified organic. It's just too hard to come by. If you don't have all organic seed for your mix, then you just as well not have any because it's not going to make the certifier happy.

13:06 The way the Organic Standards Act reads, for those organic growers, if they've looked three places and they can't find certified organic seed for that cover crop, they are allowed to use seed that is non-GMO and not treated. So we have all non-GMO seed, and I would say that 98% of all of our seed is untreated as well. Once in a while we'll get treated sorghum in because that's the only way we can get it, especially late in the year. So we are very careful to keep that segregated and not run that through the mixer where we do our organic mixes.

13:45 If you're organic, we don't have certified organic seed, but we can help you out with non-GMO and non-treated. And then all of our inoculants are OMRI labeled, approved. Well, there's one that's the new microrize product, Dale, that we have, does not have an OMRI label yet. But we've had no problems getting it accepted by the organic certifiers. They just haven't gone through the paperwork hassle of getting it OMRI listed.

14:15 Well, we're able to work with organic folks in a pretty good fashion. Yeah, one thing I would really strongly encourage, if you are certified organic, let us know. There's nothing worse than shipping somebody some seed, and then their certifier throws a flag, and they come back and say you shipped me seed that wasn't certified organic. You never told us. Make sure you tell us. Just to get the paperwork pre-started.

14:54 Right, and like Keith said, 98% of what we sell is not an issue anyway. But I had some guy yesterday ask for a quote on treated sorghum, and he said I can't use that, I'm organic. I said, didn't tell me. He said make sure you tell. It's a lot better if we know upfront than after the fact. So just on the topic of being organic, on the flip side, we get a lot of questions on what herbicides, well, twofold: what herbicides can I use on this cover crop, and then second, I—

15:38 You know maybe sprayed roundup beforehand, how long do I have to wait before I can plant this? I know that's a kind of opening up a can of worms but what would your—and they all, I'm gonna give you two minutes okay. Roundup and paraquat have no waiting period. You can plan immediately. Dale, how about liberty? Is that same? Liberties the same? Yes, and a lot of people are using Liberty more and more because it kills mare's tail very well and it kills roundup resistant big weeds very well as long as they're small and has no residual and it's safer to the applicator than paraquat.

16:21 If you add 2,4-D or dicamba then your waiting period can be very long. I mean standard rule of thumb was basically a day per ounce of 2,4-D and two days per ounce of dicamba. So at normal rates that can put you out a week to two weeks and planning. And so I would definitely be planning ahead as far as herbicides that you can put on a mixed cover crop. It ends a lot on the season and the species. If you've got a particular weed issue that you're concerned about, just let us know and we'll see what we can come up with. It's a lot better to plan the mix around the need to use a certain herbicide. Say you want to control fall panicum or some grassy weed, we might be able to put together a mix that can all tolerate dual, metolachlor, or fluor. So just let us know upfront and we can work with you and kind of design around a mix that could all be tolerant to certain type of herbicide. You're definitely going to give up a lot of diversity, the options if you want to use something with the residual. It's not impossible but you're certainly going to be limited on what you can use.

17:51 We covered this a little bit when we had Ray Ward on and for those of you that did miss that one, we do have all of our webinars recorded and they're on our website if you just search for webinars and they're also on our YouTube page. So we did ask Ray this question but we get it a lot: is how much nitrogen or fertilizer will this cover crop produce and how much do I need to apply in order to get this cover crop started? Oh my, that's a loaded question. It is, we get a lot. And like so many loaded questions, the answer is dependence. If you want maximum productivity out of a cover crop, just I want maximum biomass, I would probably go a mix that is very high in grasses with a lot of nitrogen fertilizer. I mean that's just the nature of the beast. If however you're wanting to stimulate your soil biology and increase your soil health so forth and do that with a minimum of synthetic inputs, you the route I would probably take is to include a fairly high level of legumes and inoculate with the basil. You know that way you can make all the plants in the mix fix nitrogen.

19:18 As far as how much you get, essentially you can eyeball cover crop mix, look at the biomass and every if you look at the protein content on that biomass, each protein one percent nitrogen equals six point two five percent protein. And so if you look at this biomass that's 13 percent protein, that's 2% nitrogen. So if you convert biomass into that, so if you have two tons an acre of legume biomass that's let's say four percent nitrogen, when the bacteria break that down, half of it gets consumed by the bacteria, the other half will probably get kicked out. So you can do the math and figure out about how much nitrogen you get out of that. The standard rule of thumb is the microbes eat first and they're going to eat about half the nitrogen that's in that cover crop if you're in that carbon nitrogen ratio where legumes are in that 20 to 30 range. About half of the total nitrogen contents going to be available for the next crop.

20:58 Keith, I didn't—I don't feel I did a very good job of explaining that in the gaps there. Well certainly it depends on a lot of different things and you know if your goal is to produce a lot of nitrogen then you really need to load up on the legumes and you know what I tell people is the only the only real way to know is you got to pull a sample, send it in and have it tested. And again that webinar with Dr. Ward, we kind of went through that, how you do that. You know we the bench that we were looking at and we did some videos on and we'll have more information down the road about that but you know that came back 224 pounds of nitrogen that was in that biomass and when Dale and I looked at it we were guessing lower than that but it—

21:48 Really was cranking it out a lot of mixes. If you have a diverse cover crop mix, you know, that has 30 percent legumes and 70 percent broad leaves, which maybe half of that is grasses, you know, which is fairly typical, it's not uncommon to see 60 to 80 pounds of nitrogen if you send that in for a test. That's pretty standard, pretty common. Some of that's being produced by legumes, some of that is just being cycled by the grasses, so you're still keeping it from getting away from you. And so, you know, to me that still counts. That still counts as nitrogen that's going to be available for the next crop.

22:24 And so that's a pretty decent rule of thumb as far as the fertilizer question. When people ask me should they fertilize their mix, how much should they put on, you know, it kind of depends on your goals. If your goal is to graze or to hay and you're going to be removing biomass, then I think you need to grow as much as you can, and so then I think it is worth some fertilizer investment. I generally tell people 40 to 50 pounds is probably all you need. You're not trying to produce a grain crop, so you don't have to go crazy on how much nitrogen you put out there because you're not producing grain. We're not interested in producing grain, just the forage part. So 40 to 50 pounds generally is sufficient to really make a big boost or a big notice.

23:11 But if your goal is to produce as much soil benefits as you can, then like Dale says, you know, stay away from the synthetic nitrogens and put, you know, invest three, three and a half dollars an acre in the biohizo and let it go to work. It makes your cover crop work for you. And so again, it just kind of depends on what your goals are and how much you're going to put out there after it.

23:36 The other thing with, especially like with the phosphorus, if your soils are really low in phosphorus, it may not be a bad idea to put some of that out there for the cover crop because if you're not hauling that cover crop off in a hay bale, that phosphorus is going to cycle and stay out there for the next crop. So a lot of times what we would do is we would put the phosphorus out there in the summer after wheat harvest, let the cover crop utilize it. We know that those winter-killed summer cover crops are going to cycle pretty completely by the time the corn is needing it, so we're essentially pre-fertilizing for our corn by putting it out there for the cover crop, but we're letting the cover crop use it first and then cycle and be composted back through the system.

24:20 I mean, so we don't feel like that was money that we were attributing to an input investment attributed to the cover crop. It's more for the next cash crop, but we're letting the cover crop use it first and then cycle it back through the system, right? You're fertilizing two crops with one application and one fertilizer without it, as far as the crop after the cover crop.

24:39 You know, so much of that depends on the carbon-nitrogen ratio of the material and how long it has to decay, and a lot of it also depends on how many years you've been doing this cover crop thing. I hear a lot of people tell me that they plan on a cover crop, and the first, the very first cover crop you grow, I would not give much of any nitrogen credit to it. I mean, you'll get some, but I wouldn't count on it unless you were doing some testing and you know where you sit.

25:23 But once you get the system going, you know, I said half the nitrogen in that cover crop will be available to the next crop. Once you've done this three or four years, you start adding it up. A half of this year's cover crop, you know, you'll get half of last year's, you get a quarter of the year before, you get an eighth of the year before that, and a sixteenth of the year before that. The more times you do this, the bigger the pool of organic nitrogen you build up, and eventually you get to where you have a very large pool of organic nitrogen you can tap into.

26:00 Yeah, on that note, we did have a question: if you planted hairy vetch and crimson clover at the same time, which one would provide the fastest amount of nitrogen in the spring as far as when they're terminating? It depends on time of termination. Crimson clover, where crimson is adapted, will start fixing nitrogen earlier in the spring, start growing earlier in the spring.

26:32 Spring than the batch but it also finishes quicker and has higher capacity to fix nitrogen but goes later. So I like the combination of the two. I mean, it's one of the situations where diversity is a good thing and purple and red together, you know, kind of a beautiful marriage sometimes, like a state of Nebraska. Dale, it can work.

27:08 That's assuming that you're far enough south work groups of clover will reliably overwinter. Yes, I think once you get north of I-70 it's hit and miss. You know, up here where we're at in southern Nebraska, I can say that I probably really only seen crimson clover over winter well once and over winter sort of well two or three times and the rest of the years hardly at all. Yeah, down along I-70 it's more like probably three years out of five.

27:42 Some of the newer varieties of crimson clover like the Kentucky Pride that we've been carrying is supposed to be quite a bit more winter hardy, maybe ten degrees better temperature tolerance than the Dixie that is the main crimson clover variety out on the market. Yeah, and we're trying to switch over to all Kentucky Pride but there's just not enough of it out of the market right now so we're slowly transitioning over to the better types as production comes up on it.

28:15 Okay, these next ones are more logistical. When people call in they say how long is this going to take me, I need to get this planted two days from now. What is a typical turnaround time for us and what does that process look like? That's a good question. You know, it's going to vary based on the time of the year. Sometimes in the year, you know, we can get it out that same day. Other times it may be a day or two. And when we really get into the crunch, our busiest season is probably the two weeks on either side of Labor Day, so kind of from the middle of August through the middle of September we're really busy. And then, you know, it may be four or five days.

29:04 Sometimes we have internally what we call mix con levels. So, you know, it's probably not as serious as a DEFCON level but we have mix con levels that are mixed four guys are putting out for all the salesmen to see every day. And right now I think there are at probably one or at zero, which means it's going to either get processed that same day or it might take one day. But, you know, as we get busier those mix con levels will come up. And I don't know, Noah, Dale, what's the highest mix con level you've ever seen? Probably a three or four. Yeah, because I know that one mix con five says get Keith and an ambulance because that means we're really, really swamped and busy.

29:58 So we really try to pride ourselves on giving a fast turnaround time and that's important because, you know, planting these things are very timely and you have the lead time of shipping in there as well. More often than not when we have a disappointed customer because the seed didn't get there when it should have, it's because we had some sort of shipping issue. It's rarely because we couldn't get it out the door in the timeframe that we told them that it would be. So we try to have pretty quick turnaround times. The shipping sometimes can be an issue, but that's the more lead time you can give us the better. But we certainly understand to the fact that sometimes it's difficult to make a decision and say, you know what, the weather's going to do in regards to shipping house.

30:53 I typically figured up we have flat-rate shipping across Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. So for those states we can tell you very quickly what that's going to cost and we can give you a very close estimate of how long that's going to take. Now I say take because sometimes it should be there the next day but the shipping company either sends it to the wrong terminal or they miss it or they lose it, so it takes extra time. You know, we're always fighting that, so we can tell you what it should be, not always what it will be. When we get outside those states where we have the nice flat rate shipping—oh, and Eastern Colorado we have flat rate shipping across kind of the Front Range area of Colorado as well—we get outside of those areas it gets a little more difficult. We have to go to other carriers because our local carriers don't have as good coverage in those areas and so that gets a little.

31:56 Here it gets a little pricier and we quote out four or five different companies all the time and we take the most competitive bid on the LTL or the less than truckload stuff. When it comes to large amounts, if you're getting probably 18, 20,000 pounds or more, then we can start looking at dedicated trucks that start to come in cheaper than the LTL rate and those actually are pretty good deals because those are going straight from us to you and really cuts off a lot of time. It can often save a lot of money and it almost always saves damage.

32:36 You know, if we ship you ten pallets, the chances of them all coming through unscathed from the LTL company are pretty rare. They're hard on stuff and so if we could ship it direct on a truck, that's always the best. And sometimes we'll put routes together so if we have a number of different customers in a geographical region where we can design kind of a loop or a circle and have either one of our trucks or a contract truck drop those, we can try to build a truckload out of, you know, we can go up to three different stops with a contract truck. They don't like that but they'll do it and if it's one of our trucks we can—we've done four or five. It's not ideal but we've done that.

33:19 So again, the more lead time you can give us, the more likely we can find those better shipping options for you. If you call us up and are in a panic and you need it in a rush, then we have fewer options to get shipped out to you and it's gonna cost more.

33:37 And I would encourage everybody, if you cut neighbors that you know are also buying from us, rather than us LTL shipping individual pallets, each of you see if you can get a group order put together. I have customers in a number of areas that all kind of put their heads together and place all their orders at once and have it all delivered to one location and then everybody comes and gets it and you know, it can save you several hundred dollars by doing that. And if you have a significant size order, so typically the number one question I get as far as calls go is all right, I've got the seed. What's the seeding rate? How deep do I need to plant this? There's a lot of questions around how to plant cover crop seeds so this one I do want to spend a decent amount of time on.

34:42 How do you find the seeding rate or the bushel weight on the cover crop seed that we send out? You want me to handle that, Keith? Well, I'll handle that first part. When you get a pro one out and hold it up here as nails talking about, when you get the seed analysis sheet, it's gonna say the seeding rate right on there and that will tell you thirty pounds an acre, forty pounds an acre and if you can't find that, all you got to do is take the number of acres that you're doing, the number of pounds of seed that you have and just do the math and you'll be able to tell very quickly what your seeding rate needs to be.

35:20 Setting the drill is going to be a little bit different deal. We are working on and probably won't be this year but next year on those analysis reports, it's going to tell you what the bushel weight of your overall mix is going to be and again, that's not going to tell you how to set your drill but it's going to be one factor involved in helping you get close and get started so that's what we're printing out and providing on the papers that we send you. And then once you get that, then you have to actually get that applied to your drill so today I'll go ahead and talk about several different ways that the customer can do that.

35:55 Yeah, I mean obviously there's no drill setting or you know a mixture out species that's radishes. You know, there just isn't one and so a lot of people are confused. Well, how do I set my drill? Well, box girls meter out seed, not based on the weight but on volume and the way we, you know, the English system and that American agriculture of measuring volume is in bushels so it becomes important to determine what is your bushel weight. Well, one way of doing that is to have one of these handy dandy little bushel weight apparatus and you know you put seed in here and then you just move this little balance and it'll tell you your bushel weight and then you basically find something you know similar on your chart of that bushel weight and set your drill that way and another way of doing it is to.

43:32 Calibrate than to run out and be scrambling and scraping for seed later. Show us the bush. We'll wait 30. I don't know, my stupid screen is. I don't think I will be able to do that. Okay, so it's on the paper and when you get your, especially if you're getting a tote bag, if we are shipping that, and you look in the little plastic holder on the tote, it's going to have your address, the shipping label in there. You have to look behind it to get the seed analysis sheet, and that's where the pounds per acre and eventually the bushel weight per for the overall mix is going to be as well. Most of those bags do not have multiple plastic holders, so we have to put both those pieces of paper in that one little ziploc bag holder thing on the tote.

44:28 I want to get to just a couple more questions in regard to planting, but it is 6:15, so I'm going to also just let the audience know if you guys have questions, go ahead and start putting those in here. Otherwise I'm going to keep rolling. In regard to planting, people will often ask if the seeds in these diverse mixes will separate in the drill and how deep do you plant? Yeah, we get that question all the time. The way I answer this—in Dale, you can weigh in on this too—the more diverse your mix is, the less chance that you're going to have seed separation. If you order a mix and it's peas and turnips, you're going to have separation from the get-go and it will be a disaster. Won't work. But now if you start adding in, because you know you got a large round seed and a small round seed and they're just going to move past each other really easily, but if you start throwing in oats and buckwheat and rye and sorghum and things that have different sizes, different shapes, basically what that does is it plugs all of the gaps and it makes it much more difficult for seeds to move past each other in order to separate.

45:44 Oats is a great one. We sometimes I'll put oats in a mix just to help tie it up and keep it from separating like that because oats is a long narrow shape and it's a rough seed. And so if you kind of sticks in the holes and it plugs the gaps, and that roughness keeps seeds from moving past it as easily. And it really helps bind the seeds together. So the more diverse you are, the less you have to worry about it. If you aren't as diverse, if you only have three or four things in there and there's lots of varying sizes or densities, you could have some issues with stuff pulling apart. So then the recommendation that we tell people is separation really is a component of how long is it in your drill and how long are you bouncing it along. Because if it's just sitting in a bag, it's not going to separate. It's a little more to separate as it bounces and it moves inside your drill box. So if that's a concern, then put only a little bit in your drill at a time. Maybe put enough in there that will take you an hour to plan out, and then go fill. So fill less at a time and fill more often, and you'll have less seed separation there as well.

46:56 So we do have some people that have multiple boxes on their drill and we can keep the small seeds separate. I would say we do that once in a while. It's pretty rare. And even people that have the small seed box, once they see how well that stuff really holds together and blows through a drill in a diverse mix, a lot of times they say, 'Ah, it's not worth messing with. Just mix it all together and I'll plant it.' So that's kind of our answer to how do you keep it from separating. Why don't you talk a little bit about seating depth?

47:24 Yeah, an analogy I have on the diversity reducing the separation: if you take gravel and cement powder, the cement powder will run right through the gravel. But if you put sand in there with the other two, then it all stays mixed. Same way with seed. As far as depth, when all these diverse mixes start getting planning on this, we'll never work because some of this seed needs to be at a half inch and someone that needs to be an inch. There's just no way you can make this work. Only one of those seeds is going to come up. And it's really been a bit of a 'much ado about nothing.' It's amazing when you take a mixture and you plant it say three quarters of an inch. Some of the seeds need a half-inch, some of them need an inch. You put it at 3/4 inch and everything seems to work. There's big seeds kind of break that crust and create a line of weakness that the small seeds can get sunlight earlier in that crack. They can get sunlight down here instead of having to go clear to.

48:47 The soil surface and because the big seeds are pushing and creating a line of weakness, the small seeds don't have to do a lot of pushing and so it all seems to work and we have very, very few instances where we get a complete failure of any one seed in a mix. Gail, would you say I would you agree with this?

49:14 I would say that we have more issues with people planting things too shallow and they either dry out or they sprout and then they die rather than planting even, they don't come up. Yeah, you know, if you're planting turnips by themselves and you plant them an inch deep, I'd expect complete failure. You plant turnips in a mix and go an inch deep, I'd say most of them are going to come out. Yeah, I'd rather in a mixture, in a monoculture, the rule is there's little seeds, it's better to air to shallow than to deep. In a mixture, I'd rather air to deep than too shallow.

49:56 Okay, question here from Tucker says, what do you use for insect control in your large storage units?

50:04 Nothing right now. We try not to have things in there too long. On the rare occasions where we do have to carry things over for an extended period of time, we have talked to, actually talked about trying to use diatomaceous earth on a larger scale and it's not necessarily that it's so cost prohibitive, it's it's just going to be labor-intensive to try to figure out how to get that evenly distributed. I don't know how effective it would be to just go up on top the bin and sprinkle a bunch in and have it work down. Might work, I'm not sure. We try not to treat anything with any chemicals. Once in a while and once in a while we will have to fumigate a bin with Phostoxin or individual totes if we see some insects in there, but we, that's kind of a last resort type thing. Sometimes we can recline the seed and blow those out. Thankfully, we've had very few issues with insects in long-term storage. We try to do a really good job of keeping things clean and keeping things moved and not holding things over for extended periods of time, although it does happen. We just try to limit how much it happens.

51:32 Okay, oftentimes we get questions on terminating. As far as if they want to get the full benefit of the cover crop, when should they be terminating? I know Dale, your answer's already going to be depends, but what is your guys's general rule of thumb as far as how do you plan to terminate your cover crop?

51:58 Well, I'm, it used to be, well, the advice I've given historically, anyhow, has been either get it brown and crispy when you plant or to plant green. And it's when you kill a cover crop with herbicide and it's half dead and it's limp and ragged, that's when you seem to have mechanical planting issues. If it's been dead for a week or more and it's nice and crispy, that's easy to plant into. If you're planting green, that again, the plants are full of water, they're crisp. The cultivators and everything will cut through it and that's easy as well. It's in between where you have issues. Now, I guess a special situation though, and there's all different kinds of things that can happen in any of the both situations. If you kill too early and you get a rain, then you can be stuck there because it's going to take forever to dry out. Whereas if you plant green, the plants can be pumping that water out of the profile and dry it back up. But when you plant green, there's some risks involved with that as well and some of those risks involve insect and disease issues.

53:39 One of those disease issues, if you're planting corn into rye, I think corn green and awry, there can be some transfer of Fusarium fungus there that causes root rot from the rye to the corn. That's been an issue in places. And cut worms or armyworms sometimes will transfer from, especially a cereal grain to corn or sorghum. And so something that you might want to keep an eye out for. And there's a reason they say that the farmer's footprint is the best fertilizer. Be constantly out there looking for issues. Almost all these issues are rather easy to deal with if you catch them early and can be nightmarish if you catch them late. And you know, it took us seven thousand years to figure out how to farm with tillage and no cover crops. And Barcelona, we've only been doing this cover crop no-till thing or really about 10-15 years now, most of us or less, and so there is a learning curve and there.

54:56 There are a lot of problems sometimes we don't anticipate, and that's one reason why it's good to get on webinars like this and get on our website and get on discussion groups and learn about what other problems and successes people are having so that you can repeat the successes and head off the problems. This one I'm not sure again, I'm opening up a can of worms with only five minutes left, but we do get quite a few people that want to grow something different but don't know where to necessarily sell it, so we get asked a lot of times if we purchase cover crop seed ourselves. Keith, you want to kind of answer that one for us?

55:49 Sure. We love buying cover crop seed from our customers because we believe that anything grown in a more regenerative type system is going to be a healthier or more viable type seed, so that's our preference is to have as many of our contract growers also be our customers because we know that it's going to be a better product. So that being said, you know we do have and we sell a lot of seed, so we keep a lot of seed produced. We do have a lot of customers that are growing seed for us across quite a few different states and you know it varies a lot. The things that are the easiest to grow are probably the cereals, but that's good because that's what we also sell the most on. So it's barley, triticale, rye, all those sorts of things. We have large acreages under contract and those are probably the easiest ones to get into simply because you probably already have the equipment that you need to do that. Does it take specialized stuff? Whereas if you're trying to grow like clovers or radishes or turnips or some things like that, you probably are going to need not only specialized equipment to harvest that, but you're going to need kind of a specialized environment. The thing that destroys seed quality quicker than anything is getting wet or rained on when it's ready to harvest, and so the best seed growing regions are areas like the Willamette Valley in Oregon where they get a lot of rain from September through about July, and from July through September they get hardly anything, so they have a good growing season and then a pretty consistent very dry period in which they can harvest. Another area we get a lot of seed is the Treasure Valley in Idaho, Boise, Nampa type area. They're literally in a desert. They only get six to eight inches of rainfall a year, but they've got lots of irrigation water out of the rivers, so those make really good seed growing areas for specialty crops.

58:00 What I would say is if you're interested in growing seed for Green Cover, we have a full-time guy now. I used to do it myself and did a terrible job of it because I just didn't have time. Scott Raven is our guy right now that handles all of those contract acres, so if you're interested, you can send any of the sales team that you've been working with an email and just say hey, I'm interested in growing seed for you guys, can you connect me with Scott? Or you can just email Scott directly. It's just Scott at greencoverseed.com, and just tell them what you're interested in doing. Peace. He's going to have some fairly high standards. Growing good quality seed is a lot different than just growing commodity grade, and so he'll kind of walk you through some of the different things that we would expect, the people that we would require, and if you know all of those things sound reasonable and workable to you, then he'll continue to work with you and see if we can get you as part of the growing team. So yes, we do that. You know, we have lots of people that are interested in that, so we're trying to select the best growers and also the best location. So we like to spread our acres out but also keep them as close to here as possible to minimize freight costs and keep the cost down for everybody.

59:24 All right. Good. I do have one question that I'll ask you guys here to finish up, but as far as my part, thank you guys so much for tuning in this week. Like I said, next week will be our last webinar. We're going to talk about what to plant. We're going to kind of touch a little bit on what to plant into your corn and soybeans after harvest, maybe some intercede in different ways, aerial seed, and things like that. That will be next week. So thanks Keith and Dale. My last question for you guys and as well as if you guys have any other last comments is

59:58 What is the best resource that you guys have to learn more about these topics that you would recommend others to look into? One, you know, we put a lot of time and effort into our soil health resource guide, so I definitely would recommend getting a copy of that if you don't have one or downloading it online and reading through that. Really, in my opinion, the best resource right now is YouTube. If you know how to search YouTube, you can literally find anything. Now, that doesn't mean finding anything doesn't necessarily mean good. So it's a little bit like mining for gold—you're going to have to throw away a lot of rock to get the good nuggets. We've tried to go through and get a lot of those nuggets and curate them on our green cover seed channel. So we've got all these webinars. Dale and I have a lot of videos where Noah's filmed us out in the field talking about these different crops. We're going to make a special emphasis moving forward on trying to do what we call situational learning, where we would go out either to a field that's having a problem or a field where we're trying to solve a problem, and we'll just stand there and we'll talk about what we're trying to do, and make a 5, 10, 15 minute video about a particular situation and how we're trying to deal with it with a cover crop or a biological solution. So that's what we want to do moving forward. We don't have a lot of those right now. We have a lot of talking about, you know, here's what triticale looks like, or when you use it, but we're going to try to do more of those situational things. So I encourage people to enroll in YouTube University and get in there and take whatever classes you want. The nice thing about it is if you start one you don't like it, bail out on it and go find something else. There's lots of things out there to choose from.

1:01:50 I would add to that. I would second that and also add to that network. I think I would encourage you to get to as many in-person meetings as you can and get to know the people who are doing this stuff. The greatest exchange—email addresses and phone numbers—and chances are whatever problem you are looking at, someone else has faced the same problem and handled it in various ways, some successful and some not. So knowing who those people are is just gold. And that's why I think one of the best things about this job is I get to go to these meetings and interact and rub shoulders with all these people who have walked this walk, you know, as long or longer than I have. And you get all these people that for all these acres, you don't have to make all the mistakes yourself. Like they say, experience is the best teacher, but experience comes from bad things happening, and rather than make the mistakes, you cannot afford the tuition at the school of hard knocks. Learn from other people rather than having to make those mistakes yourself. And get to know those people.

1:03:27 Thanks Dale. I can't help but think you look like a zebra. I just wanted to make that. I know that the sunlight is coming in and I keep shifting trying to find a place where the sun is coming down. And so now it's a good segue—you want to mention our field days?

1:03:55 Yeah, absolutely. Our field day is going to be August 5th and 6th. Not like the email that I sent out that said the 6th—understand it is the 5th and the 6th of August. We're going to do basically the same thing each day, so it's not a 2-day event, it's just a one-day event, but we wanted to make sure that everybody's safe and we don't have too large of a group, so we're going to limit it to 100 people each day. There is a free lunch included in that, and we're going to go look at—we've got over a hundred different species planted in our plots, so there's a lot to look at out there. And then we also are going to look at—if you've seen the video on YouTube on the weeding feed, we planted green into some Ryan vets. We're going to talk about that as well and look at what we're doing more on a large scale on our farm, and should be a lot of fun. So if you want to go register for that, I believe we put the link out on Facebook, so you can go look at it. They're all posted on a website shortly, so absolutely go ahead and sign up for that. Would be excited to have you there. Tourist destinations, come on out.

1:05:04 With that, thank you guys so much. Appreciate you tuning in, and hopefully you got something out of this. We will see you all next week for the finale of season one. Thanks everybody.