Corn Interseeding: Timing, Equipment, and Real-World Trials

0:03 Okay, well while I get that up and going, it should be ready. It is, we're gonna go ahead and get those here. It is, five baby, we've got beef burns here with us today and here Dean, muting real quick, okay, if not it might be running through mine, but I'll go ahead and get us started here. I think it is on your end, beam.

0:49 So you guys can present. We are going to be talking about corn interceding today. So we brought Dean on board. He's got a lot of experience doing some interceding trials across the state of Nebraska. I'm not sure if he's doing some in other states as well, but brings a lot of expertise in this area. It is something that is relatively new, but there's a lot of tips and tricks that we kind of learn to set you up for success, at least when it comes to doing some of these trials.

1:17 So with that, we're gonna get started. If you guys have any questions, feel free to go ahead and type them out in the comments or in the Q&A portion. We'll try to either answer those live during this portion or we will go until about 6:15 and then we'll open it up to questions so that you guys can ask our panelists and they will answer them live for you guys. So with that, Keith and Dean, why don't you guys start? I'm not sure who wants to go first. Keith, you want to start sharing your presentation and we can go from there?

2:04 Okay, can you see my PowerPoint? Okay, yep. Okay, great. Well, thanks everybody for joining us, talking about interceding covers in the corn is a fascinating topic. It's probably one of the topics that we get the most questions about. It's something that people just desperately want to make work because it is. If we can make it work, it's absolutely going to be one of the best ways to get these diverse cover crop mixes integrated into a more straight corn bean rotation.

2:39 So a lot of people have done a lot of things to try to make it work. There's a lot of hurdles to overcome. Thus the reason that it's not being more widely done because there are a lot of difficulties, a lot of challenges that go along with this. So appreciate being with us. Just a bit of background on bean. Bean is a kind of hazard position between you and I, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and one of the NRDCs here in Nebraska, and he can share a little bit more later about how that works. But it's really a great partnership between the University and our natural resource district that allows him to work kind of on both sides.

3:19 What I really appreciated about bean is that he really has a farmer's heart and a farmer's mentality, and I mean that in the best way possible. He thinks and he works and he acts like a farmer. And I know farmers really appreciate that. So with that being said, I'm going to go ahead and get started here. I've got a few slides that'll just kind of give some background information, some of the general things when it comes to interceding, and then Dean is going to share more about a particular project that he has been spearheading.

3:52 We've been fortunate enough to work with with arm by Grant at North of Grand Isle. So when it comes to interceding into corn, there are several things that are just really, really important that you get right. And one of the first things is timing is very critical. And Dean will share a little bit more about this as he gets into some of his slides. We kind of had to learn this the hard way out of the field. It's really important that you get timing right.

4:23 What I mean by that is if you wait until too late, the cover crop is not going to have enough time to grow before the corn completely canopies. So if you go too early, you can actually hurt your corn by having too much competitiveness, too much competition with that as well. So it's pretty important that you get the cover crop planted at about V4, B3 to B4, B5, somewhere in there. As you can see in this graph, that's the sweet spot. That's when we want to get that up and going.

4:56 You don't want to get it in at planting time. That can be too competitive. You don't want to wait till B6, B7, B8, because what happens is the corn will canopy and it will shade out your cover crop. Because in order for these things to work, you have to get enough cover crop establishment in order to get some growth on that cover crop so that when it goes into the more shaded period and the heat of the summer, it has enough reserves to try to last and survive.

5:23 As Dean will show, a lot of times we'll see really good stands, really good crops early on, but the challenge is getting them to survive under that shade canopy throughout the summer. And if we have time, we may talk about what some people are doing—some real innovative things, a 60-inch corn, white or row spacings and things like that to try to make this work better. I don't know if we'll have time to get into that a lot, but if there's enough interest, that may potentially be another whole webinar topic, and we can get some people on that have done some experience with 60-inch corn and how that's working.

5:58 Timing is critical if you're going to try this. You really need to try to hit that B4 B3 to B5 window—I think is about ideal for getting that to work. Secondly, the seeding method is very important, and again Dean will share more specifics about this, but it's really important we feel to get the seed in the ground. I know it's far easier and more people have access to equipment that will just broadcast the seed and lay it on top of the ground, and as we have seen, that will work very well some years, and other years it's almost a complete failure, simply because it's so much more dependent upon the weather. It's much more susceptible to insects. It's much more susceptible to so many things when you don't get it in the ground.

6:43 So if you're going to do this and you really want to give yourself the best chance of success, get the seed in the ground somehow, and it doesn't take fancy equipment. The pictures that I have here are several different commercially available. Henniker makes one. The one on the left is the Don Duo seed. The one in the middle is the Penn State interseeder, but I've seen guys just use a simple Gandy box and a fertilizer opener below the seed down to that fertilizer opener, get it in the ground and get it covered up, and that works just fine too. So whether you're building something on the farmer level or using a commercially available piece of equipment like you're seeing here, it's pretty important that you try to get that seed in the ground to give it the best chance of success.

7:29 And then the third thing that's really important to understand and consider: if you're not organic—if you're an organic farmer, then this doesn't apply to you, but for the rest of the people, the herbicide management is a real key. And I should say herbicide and weed management, because you can go without any herbicides at all, but you may have a real weedy mess, and that's going to defeat the purpose of trying to do this. So you really need to pay attention to your herbicides.

7:58 I want to point out this website here. I would encourage everybody to write this down: interceedingcovers.com. You might just type that into the chat box there too, but interceedingcovers.com. There's a really good website. This is one of the pieces of that website—it's a herbicide guide that talks about some of the different herbicide families, chemistries, talks about the rate and the timing, and then it has a thumbs up or a thumbs down or 'might work' and it may not for the different families of cover crops: annual ryegrass, legumes, brassicas, and the mixes. There, so you really need to plan out your herbicide strategy, because if you're going to come in with a product like Callisto, which is a good herbicide but it's good because it has a really long, strong, powerful residual, you can see that one—it's thumbs down on everything but the annual ryegrass. So your legumes, brassicas, mixture is not going to work very well if you're using a really powerful chemistry like that.

9:03 So if you want to try this, you want to try it on an area where you don't have significant weed problems, because that could really come back to bite you. So timing, seeding method, and herbicide—those are the first three hurdles that you need to get over if you want to try this, if you want to experiment with this. And once you get those three things going, you figure it out, then a lot of them check with crop insurance agent, because the crop insurance, they have loosened up a little bit. I think you can probably talk to your crop insurance agent and get, just make sure that they're going to be okay with this and doing this type of thing is not going to throw you out of the insurance program the way that the crop insurance rules are written.

9:52 Little bit of a gray area as to when you can intercede. Technically it just says the neck. Do you know if you intercede a crop into a growing crop, it cannot. They won't pay any damages if it hurts it. I've never seen a study that has shown where if you plant a cover crop at B4 or later where it said that hurt. I've certainly seen it hurt things if you plant it too early and if you go too late, it's not gonna hurt the corn but I won't have much of a cover crop stand there as well. So be sure you check with your insurance agent before you do that as well.

10:28 Here's just another website. This is a UNL trimmer of different herbicides. I just was starting to Google somebody's saying this is a presentation that Chris Proctor from UNL did and it just shows which products have injury, possible injury, likely injury, unlikely. So the ones that aren't going to likely have injury to a lot of your cover crops are ones that have a very short duration residual effect. So just do your research on that to know what you're gonna do.

11:01 I'm going to talk just a little bit about the different species that you might select if you're wanting to put cover crops into your corn at that beef or target and then bean. Again, it's going to show some pictures the different mixes that we did for this project that we've been working on for several years but the goals that you have for interceding is going to affect the species that you select and there's probably four different goals. One would be to fix the nitrogen, one would be to build soil organic matter, one would be to help suppress some weeds and then one is going to be for additional grazing. I'll talk about each one of those just a little bit but keep in mind this is an inter seeding. You are not going to see all of the cover crop benefits that you're going to see if the cover crop has full sunlight and full resources to grow. So you have to approach this with realistic goals and as I show you pictures here, I think that will become fairly obvious.

11:55 If you want to fix nitrogen, again have realistic expectations. You are not going to plant an interceded cover crop with corn. You're not going to produce all of the nitrogen needs for that corn. Well, I should say if you have very high yield gold, if your yield goal for your corn is only 100 bushel, you can probably do that. But if you're wanting to grow 250 bushel corn or 200 or whatever it is, a interceded legume is not going to give you all the nitrogen that you need to do that. You're going to have to have other sources. You're going to have to have had a previous legume cover crop that's breaking down so you can get some help but it's not going to be enough. You're going to have a limited growth window because if the legumes are only going to grow aggressively as long as they get sunlight and that's going to be a limited window. And then also if you're a conventional farmer and you're putting nitrogen on your cornfield, which most of us are still going to do, it can limit how much nodulation that those legumes are giving you. So again, just have realistic expectations going into it. You can experiment with different rates of nitrogen, different rates of legumes but I would do those experiments on relatively small areas that you can monitor pretty well.

13:12 For the legumes, these are the ones that we've seen do best. Red clover works really well. It's actually a short-lived perennial so it over winters very well. Here's a picture of it over wintered and you can see the corn stalks there. This is the next spring after it was enter seeded. It has a deep taproot, so which is good, it helps it survive the winter but it also makes it a little more challenging to terminate the next spring. It can be done but it's a little more challenging. It's fairly shade tolerant in that it will grow under that shade better than most of the other clovers will. And if you're going to do it, you know 8 to 12 pounds is a full rate of red clover and again, we're because this is a companion crop, we're not going to be going full rate. So I'm just putting these full rates out here just as kind of a basis. You'd plant that much red clover if that was the only thing that you were planting. Crimson clover is another option. It's a little bit cheaper. It's rose a little faster than red clover, probably will give you more fall biomass but it's not.

14:13 Going to overwinter very often up here in Nebraska where we're at. If you're further south or in a more moderate climate, crimson clover may work great. It is cheaper seed but it is larger seed size, so your seeding rate is up a little bit. So red clover and crimson clover, if you look at cost per acre on a full seeding rate, it's about the same. Again, it's somewhat shade tolerant. Clovers in general have more shade tolerance than most other legumes and most of their broadleaf plants, but again if it's a completely closed canopy, it's going to be really tough. And that's why it's important that you try to get these crops established before you get to full canopy.

14:55 This isn't a great picture I had to blow it up too much here, but this is hairy vetch. It's the best overwintering annual legume. We've seen some decent success with hairy vetch being interceded in cup corn. It's got decent shade tolerance. The majority of the growth in nitrogen-fixing though that you're going to get from this hairy vetch is not going to come through the summer or even in the fall. It's going to come the next spring if you can get it to survive and give you growth in March/April in the first part of May. Twenty to thirty pounds is a full per acre rate on hairy vetch. So those would be the legumes that I would consider the cool season legumes.

15:31 Now here's another one. This is a cow pea. This is Christy Child's picture. Some of you know Chris from Iowa. He's what I love Chris because he's not afraid to experiment and does lots of cool things, and we can all learn from them. Cow peas are a warm season annual. All those others that we looked at were cool season. The cool season plants typically go into a kind of a semi dormant state because of the summer heat, and that's good because it helps them survive in that shaded environment because they're in kind of a semi dormant state. Cow peas love the heat. They love to grow in the heat. And what they will do is they will grow fast and they will grow tall and they will bind all the way up these plants. And Chris showed me some pictures of these cow peas bind all the way up to eight to ten foot tall corn plants. And he even had one year where his corn had matured out before it froze, and so these cow peas were still alive. So the corn plants were completely dead. The cow pea plants were very much alive. But he said it was not a harvest issue. They blew right through the combine just fine. So they do die with first frost. So typically you won't be dealing with them when you're harvesting your corn, particularly if you're further north where that you will get that frost typically before you harvest corn. Cow peas are excellent if you're doing silage corn. They can really provide some good protein boost in with that corn as well.

16:53 Buckwheat. Moving on to the building soil organic matter category. Buckwheat is a really fast growing plant. It gets off to a quick start. Most of the growth in buckwheat that you're going to get in this type of situation is going to happen the first three to four weeks. Once it canopies over, it just kind of wants to stall out. It will die with the first frost. It's not going to be a harvest issue out there typically like this plant that you see in this picture here. The buckwheat that does survive in that shaded environment will get kind of spindly, but you will see buckwheat bloom and those blooms can help attract some beneficial insects. Buckwheat is relatively inexpensive to put out there, so we like putting some buckwheat in with some of these mixes that we're doing.

17:39 Annual ryegrass is probably one of the most popular grasses for interceding for several reasons. But first of all, don't confuse this with cereal rye. Two different plants. Annual ryegrass is a much more fluffy type seed. It's much finer stemmed and it doesn't get nearly as tall. So whereas cereal rye, which we'll talk about next, gets very tall. The grain looks like wheat. This is going to look more like the grass that you're growing in your front yard. It has better shade tolerance than the cereals and it does go semi dormant in the heat, and that's one of the reasons that people use annual ryegrass. In most of these interceded mixes, will have an annual ryegrass base. It is a very deep rooted cover crop, so we really like that about it. There are some better winter hardy varieties. So whether you want it to overwinter or whether you don't want it.

18:28 To overwinter, I can, you know, there's different types of annual ryegrass that we can choose to give you the best chance of it either dying in the cold weather or trying to survive, although there's no guarantees because you're planting this stuff in June and you're trying to get it to survive all the way til the next spring, which is tough to do. It's not impossible, but it doesn't happen or doesn't work all the time.

18:50 Spring termination can be a little tricky within rye grass. You really have to pay attention to weather conditions, and you can't really cheat very much on following the rules, so when it comes to terminating that stuff, because it is so deep-rooted, it is a more difficult plant to terminate. 15 to 20 pounds per acre is a full seeding rate of an Indo rye grass, whereas your cereals are going to be 50, 60, 70 pounds per acre, so you can get by with less seed out there.

19:20 Cereal rye, most people are familiar with that, very cold hardy, very good at surviving winters. Again, planted in June, it makes it much more difficult for this plant to try to survive, but it will go semi-dormant in the heat. It's not as shade tolerant as annual ryegrass, so you really need to try to get a little growth on it, and then the canopy, the shade comes, the heat comes, it kind of shuts that plant down, and you just try to keep it alive until the canopy opens back up later in the summer and then the early fall, and then it will take off and really do well. So it's going to be one of the better grazing plants and it can give you some fall grazing and certainly excellent spring grazing if you can get it established and if you can get it to survive.

20:05 What we've learned with this type of interceding, there's no guarantees on that. You just have to put it out there and learn from the weather conditions, and every year it's going to be a little different. And then all of the brassicas, we tried all these radishes, turnips, and collards, mustards. We've seen all of them work. We've seen all of them not work.

20:28 Typically, probably the radishes are the one that we would use the most, but we've seen pretty decent luck with collards and rapeseed doing pretty well also. They are going to be very deep-rooted. You're not going to see many of these overwinter. Occasionally you'll see some rapeseed or some turnips, possibly the radishes, and mustards. You're not going to see those overwinter.

20:49 The seeding rate on these is pretty low, six to eight pounds at a full acre rate, so we would only put one or two pounds of these in a mix, and if you can get these establish, that can be good for fall grazing. We don't really have time to talk about it today, but the guys that are doing this into seed corn, you use a lot of brassicas and they get a tremendous amount of growth and a lot of benefit from the grazing on that as well. So the grazing does work well when you get a good growth.

21:17 I've seen this look really good in the 60-inch corn, and again, we may want to consider having a session just on guys that are going to 60-inch corn or some are doing 40-inch corn, just giving the row spacing, so you get better growth of these cover crops. I've seen it look really good in the seed corn. In most years, if you're putting this in a before, your fall grazing is going to be limited, but spring grazing can be an option. Now, every year's different. Some years I've seen pretty good fall grazing, but for the most part, your fall grazing is going to be more of a limited situation in be for commercial corn.

21:56 That's kind of the background. That's kind of a little bit of getting us started with the basics. I'm going to see if I can play. I've got about a five-minute video here. I'm actually going to jump out of this and see if I can play this video, and you may have to get back on and let me know if it's working or not. This video is one that the central planning RD put together about the project that Dean has been working very closely on. I've been helping for the last several years as well. So I'm just going to play this. I don't know how well you're going to be able to hear it, so you'll have to give me some feedback here.

23:33 We're in a location on the sign farm where we have done a cover crop study.

23:40 Where we have interceded cover crops in v4 corn in middle of June and what we're doing is looking at what has come up and things like that. Now the purpose for this plot is to evaluate what species will come up and survive in a shaded canopy for commercial corn. A good start through the summer in a rye grass for example, maybe the buckwheat is always early crop. Some will come up later. The red clovers are like the cool weather versus some warm weather cow peas for example like and so we'll see that change throughout the summer.

24:25 And then it's interesting to see where you'll have some of the species freeze out and others continue to grow and not freeze and survive the winter and giving us longer days of so biology and soil health. Well what we have today is a plot that has seven different treatments in it and I'm going to read off what's in each one of those treatments. Starting with number one, the title of it is fall grazing. Number one it has cow peas, forage soybeans, annual ryegrass and impact forage collards buck. We fall graze number two, winter peas, forage soybeans, annual ryegrass, cereal rye and r8c. Number three warm season diversity to cow peas, forage soybeans, crimson clover, annual rye grass and radish, flax and buckley. Number four Penn State mix, red clover, hairy vetch, annual ryegrass. Number five Penn State mix with buy as oh it's an inoculant recently, red clover, very batch, annual ryegrass. Number six Penn State mix with micro applied red clover, hairy vetch and you're right grass. Number seven a six for bass mix we have help on rye and red clover.

26:28 And one of the hottest topics that everybody wants to know about is interceding in the corn. Can we intercede in the corn? What works, what doesn't? And as we've been very privileged to build work with Dean and the sign family on this project here in the last six years of doing probably some of the most extensive interceding plots in the country that I'm aware, especially on the scale that this has been done at and I'm really excited about what I saw here today. I think we have some of the better, nicer stands that we've ever seen in these plots, primarily because several years ago the signs went to putting the seed in the ground instead of broadcasting and that's made a big difference. The seed to soil contact is very, very important.

27:07 And then this year with that we finally got the timing right. In past years we haven't always been as early as what we wanted to be or trying to be. This year they got this seed and they're at me four, which is really important and I think we saw much better stand establishment and much better grow than what we have in past years. Okay, so they did a really good job putting that together.

27:38 There's another video that was from the 2019 study. There's another video from 2018 that's more of a 35-minute crop tour and I'll have a link to that at the end of this slideshow. So Dean, why don't you come back on and we'll just kind of take people through a little bit of this project and you can kind of explain what you got going on here.

28:04 Okay, everybody can everybody hear me? I'm hoping we started. We started the interceding in 2014 as this slide shows and then that in that year we went ahead and used signs mail destroyer that you see there with heard spreader on and went into commercial corn and just basically broadcast that into a commercial corn. And what you see on the left here is some pictures of what that the results from that interceding, but there was one bit, one problem. The calibration was terrible. We after we calculated everything out, we probably put between sixty and seventy pounds of seed out there and I look at this. We need to try and keep this as economical as we can, so that's why we think that we should we see what what we see here pretty good stand, but it cost us quite a bit to the acre.

29:25 Okay, so in 2016 we kind of figured out that you know seed to soil contact is going to be very important. So we took some surplus equipment that signs had, which basically were insecticide boxes off on a John Deere planter and you know, modified them a little bit so so we could plant cover crop seed with them. We spent at least three days in the shop calibrating the boxes to get the correct amount of product out, but when we went to the field that all went out the.

30:11 So it wasn't very successful as far as calibration on the pounds per acre that we wanted to do. But if you look at this equipment here, what you see is some Heinicke rolling shields that we mounted behind the fertilizer applicator. If a person had a Gandy air cedar and dropped that in front of those spiders, I believe that would work very well, at least try and get that broadcast method incorporated. So I kind of nicknamed this our redneck machine. If the calibration would have been okay, it would have been alright.

31:08 Here's some pictures from those plots that year. As you can see, we have pretty decent emergence of the cover crops. Well, I think we have one more, Keith. So that looks pretty good. I mean, I think it would work, but I would rather see a Gandy or some type of air seeding stuff on top of that.

31:39 In 2017, the Sign family purchased a Honaker in-row cedar. They basically felt that seed-to-soil contact is very important, and I totally agree. So they went ahead and purchased this unit. They have actually expanded this unit to a 16-row machine instead of an 8-row machine, just because we realized that timing is important so they can get over all their acres in a hurry.

32:23 Here are some pictures of the in-row seating results from that. As you can see, there's two rows between each corner row that are spaced, I believe, eight inches apart, but I think they've widened them out a little bit because they've got some fields that they want to try and plant next year's corn crop in between those two rows of cover crop and let it grow a little bit longer.

33:06 Hey Dean, I just want to point out too on this picture just notice that there's still sunlight coming in. This corn is not yet to tassel, but it will be fairly soon. And so if you look at that, there's pockets of sunlight and there's pockets of shade. So you know, could you get a cover crop started if you planted it at this stage? Maybe, but you're really starting to run out of sunlight. So again, the timing of planting is just really critical because you can see how much growth this cover crop already has, and it needs to have that much because it's only getting about 50% sunlight at this point right. I mean, and if you did do it at this time, you'd probably have to be with a high clearance vehicle, and majority of those I know of just broadcasted.

34:00 I don't know if there's anybody around here too dead set. This is a picture from the harvest in 2017. You can see that even at harvest time, we had good growth because of the good seeding and stuff like that. So we were really happy on the results in 2017.

34:23 As far as carrying it on through this next slide, this is the treatments that I'm going to have in my 2020 interseeding plot. Basically, here it's a repeat. It's a repeat of 2019 for majority up through the pin state treatment number 4. And the reason for this is the video that you watched showed very good growth. And when we went out there to harvest, there was nothing left. You would have thought from that video that, man, it would have been great for fall grazing and everything like that. But for some reason, Keith and I and Rich and whoever, we haven't really figured out where it disappeared. The only thing we can think of might have been insects eating it up, but that was a lot of biomass in my opinion to have the insects eat up all that.

35:38 So what we're doing this year, I'm going in with majority of the same treatment, same species in each one of those. And we're going to have cameras out there that take pictures twice a day so we can monitor what's going on throughout the growing season. The other new ones, there's three new ones here. And the first one is number five, where we went ahead and went into Green Covers Smart Mix and picked out a series of entries that we wanted and went by the suggested.

42:14 One could really go down low if a lot of that got leaked out of the soil in wet spring, and that's the theory here is to manage that residual. Because the whole story behind this was I was having trouble recommending nitrogen to the seed corn growers because we weren't getting consistent yields because of that. So my theory was instead of telling our working on how much to put on, let's manage what's left.

42:44 And in 2011, and the difference between the do-nothing and a couple of those, that's almost 100 pounds an acre. That's huge, that's huge. Yeah, and if you get a lot of rain, where does that go? Into the ground. Yep, that's right.

42:57 Now another question that a lot of producers have is how deep do roots go, or what kind of root system do we have? So I set up a plot and you can see the mixes over there on the left what I had in each one of these. So I went out and I planted it July 6th. So we're looking at one month, July 6 to August 4th when I went out and took these readings. As you can see, we have not so tall, not a lot of biomass on some of these on top the ground, but look how deep they were. I mean the shallowest one was mixed number four, which is rapeseed and notes. The rest of them were, you know, we had root depth down to 40, 43 inches at the deepest. So what this shows you is a lot of times don't base with what's going on root depth on what you see on top the ground.

44:17 I went out and probed 3-inch cereal rye more in March of 2016 and I found roots 30 inches deep on three-inch rye. And that's, I love this picture Dean, because you know a lot of people, they only see that cover crop get that three to four or five inches tall and then they're terminating it to plant their next crop and they think maybe it didn't work or it didn't have a lot of effect. But 30 inches of root, I mean you'd be lucky to pull a ripper that deep and you've got, you know, millions of little tiny rippers doing the job with no soil disturbance on top whatsoever.

45:00 Right, this is right. And actually it was surprising, surprised me that it was that deep on that short rye. But I'm a believer now. I mean, that's I can see this happening all the time.

45:16 Okay, next, here's some just some pictures of some results of the interseeding. Majority of these, I don't know Keith, I think you chose these. I don't think you just chose them because they look it. Well, you might have. Yeah, I actually, I think some of these were from a farmer in North Dakota. I just want to help I think broad spectrum, you know. This one had to because it's a single row. Yeah, I think this is Jeremy Wilson from North Dakota. One of the reasons I put this out here.

45:50 The further north you go, the better this system is going to work. The further south you go, the more you will struggle to make this work. And there's some good reasons for that. Number one, as you move north, your summers are shorter but your days are longer, and again it's all about sunlight. This whole thing is sunlight is the limiting factor. And if you have longer days in a shorter summer, you're going to get more sunlight down to those plants. So typically we see this work better in the north. You know, Dean and I, Dean reference the Penn State mix over and over again. Penn State was one of the leaders in developing a lot of this, and that's because they have the most success, you know, up in that area. So can it work in Nebraska? Yeah, we've seen it work in Nebraska. You go too much further south of here and it's just continues to get harder and harder to do because you got longer summers, you got hotter summers, you've got shorter days during the summer, and those things all work against you. But the good thing is the trade-off. The further south you go, the more time you have to plant a cover crop after you harvest corn. So there are some trade-offs there as well.

47:06 This is just another picture with a Gatorade bottle there for some perspective. And again, this is up in Jamestown, North Dakota. Excellent, excellent stand and growth, and he had a pretty good corn up there that year too. And when I took these pictures, he was probably gonna pull 180 bushel corn off this. So it's not like, you know, this is in 60 bushel corn and there was.

47:26 Tons of sunlight. So again, this website Interceding Covers Calm is really good. I also would encourage you if you liked the little video tour thing. This link right here and you can just go to the Green Cover Seed YouTube channel and just search for Interceding Cover Crops or something like that. I'll paste this into the chat window but you can just go to our YouTube channel and search for Interceding and this will come. This is about a 35 minute video tour of the 2018 plots. The five minute video we watched were from 2019. This will be from 2018 but again it just is a little video tour taking you through the project that we did there.

48:12 So I think that's all we got. We can open it up to questions. I want to make one more comment about the plots because each year it's an evaluation of the entries and Keith mentioned the farmer in me. Yes, I don't like I like good results but I don't like spending a lot of money. So what the purpose here is is to really be able to guide producers in what entries they may have the most success at if they want to intercede.

48:54 Yeah, absolutely. You can go ahead and start your video up again here for question time if you can. And this first question is actually for Dean from May. He was wondering if the study that you were talking about with I'm assuming this is questions in regard to the sunlight. Has that study been published and is there a place I can find that?

49:16 It has not been published no. I've used it in PowerPoint presentations and stuff like that but I have not done that. I might add another thing that I'm looking at maybe this year is I want to monitor soil moisture. Not moisture but soil temperature also where the recovery isn't where it isn't. That's not so.

49:42 So Dean just to get this straight this year you'll do air temperature soil temperature or light intensity and you'll also have some stop-motion video you know where we're taking a couple pictures today at certain sites yeah. I'll be though I guess I could I could make available. We we can get those pictures on the Internet throughout the season if we wish so yeah that'd be cool.

50:14 No, Mark is asking can this work in 15 inch corn? So obviously I think it'd be a great idea to do a webinar on 60 inch but we're going kind of the opposite direction on smaller rows here. You guys have any insight on that? Well I mean can it work yeah will it be more difficult yes. You know 15 inch corn your rows are closer together but your plants are further apart but the whole purpose of 15 inch corn is to get faster canopy and to absorb as much of the sunlight as possible and so that's great for the corn crop. The more you do that it's going to be more difficult for your inner seed to to work so I think it would be more difficult for that to work.

51:05 And in the concept of the 60 inch corn is you're not really cutting back on the population because people are planning if you're planting 30,000 population on 30 inch rows you're still planning 30,000 population you're just doing it on a 60 inch row and the most successful people that I've seen are doing twin rows on 60 so they're doing two rows 7 and 1/2 inches apart but those are on 60 inch centers and you know the guys that are doing this on some small scales they're not seeing a lot of yield drag. There's a little bit but a lot of them are seen a minimal yield drag and in a huge boost in how much cover crop biomass. So the cattle guys are really looking at it hard going I can give up just a little bit of yield for the additional grazing I'm gonna get. 15 inch corn I don't know. I think it would be difficult but Dean was your thoughts there?

52:02 I would totally agree with you that it's going to be awful difficult to do that mainly because of sunlight. I mean even even if you you planted it you know with like a Hynek or whatever to get good emergence I don't know. I don't know if it's gonna if it's going to to survive because if you look at that one picture that you you made comment about on a 30-inch row look look how much sunlight you were getting just at 30. Well you cut that in half and there's gonna be a lot more. You know just to give you an up front here I have a cooperator that is interested in doing some work on 60 inch rows into next year so we're gonna probably go ahead and have some kind of a plot there for that tube. So and there's the practical Farmers of Iowa have done a bunch of 60-inch row work so you know.

53:04 That no, I think that definitely may be something that we could do a webinar topic on, whether it's yet this spring or whether we push that to fall when we maybe would gather a little bit more data from other people who are doing it. And I guess realistically, the person that asked that question, what's his real goal? I mean, that's one thing—is it going to be a grazing project, you know, or what's his goal there? I don't know.

53:48 Keith, you touched on this with the yield aspect. There was a question earlier on whether or not you see a boost in yield from the inter-seed if they graze on that, and you already kind of answered that, but just want to see if there's any other comments you had on maybe an increase. The studies that I've seen—and again, if you get on the internet and Google, you know, inter-seeding corn studies—you'll get a lot of the Penn State research because again, they were the first university to really do this and push it. There's been quite a bit of this done up in Ontario, Canada and places like that. I've never seen a study that showed from V4 after—it's ever hurt your corn yield. Probably half of the studies that I've seen have shown a modest yield increase, maybe 30 to 40 percent of them have really shown no difference, and there's been a few studies where it's been a significant yield increase.

54:45 I think the yield increases may be reflective of a lot of the rest of your system, you know, what else you're doing. If you put these inter-seeded cover crops in and change nothing else in your system, it's likely not going to change a lot of other things and you may not see a lot from the first year that you do it. But as you do it year after year and you're building up that biological vault or the biological savings account, if you will, it's kind of a cumulative effect. And I think guys are seeing the results in year two, year three, and year four than they do in year one. And that's the same way with cover crops. But I don't know that there's been any super definitive studies.

55:28 I know Dean has signed said they'd ever done yield checks when they did. Oh yeah, they were unyielding on every strip and everything, and as far as yield drag, no, I haven't—I haven't really seen any yield drag.

55:49 I guess one thing that we have noted over time with just cover crop versus no cover crop—we're seeing soil temperatures in the spring be approximately six degrees warmer where the covers are then where's bare. Now that can be huge, which I think is opposite of what a lot of people may think would happen. So that's why I want to get sensors to start monitoring soil temperature on a with and without too. And I've seen other pictures of that where the snow is melted in a field where there's cover crops and it's still there where the soil is bare. And I think the logical explanation—because yeah, dude, that defies the logic of it, you know, bare soil warming up quicker—but it's the biology, you know, the respiration and the activity of the biology that's keeping that soil alive and active and warmer.

56:56 A question from Kyle: he was asking if there's any trials in southeast Kansas or southwest Missouri. Are you guys familiar with other people that are doing similar things to what the Simon brothers are doing, maybe not in Nebraska but in other states? Well, again, you know, Practical Farmers of Iowa—there's a bunch of work being done up there with this type of concept. But as far as southeast Kansas and into Missouri, I don't know. Again, I say the further south you go, the more you're gonna struggle to make this work just because of weather and length of the summer and heat of the summer and all of that. So I guess I'm not really aware. There probably is some—I'm not necessarily aware of them.

57:53 If you would like to try it on a small scale, let us know. I mean, we're always—we'd love to work with people who want to do small plot work and you know, we're more than happy. We'd even donate some seed if you just wanna say, 'I just want to take it out and try it on a few acres,' you know, let me know. We'll work with you on that. If you give us some feedback, some information back to let us know how that worked.

58:15 On a big field scale level until you kind of get your wheels under you and give it a try on a small scale first. You can learn as much on two acres as you can on two hundred and it costs you a whole lot less and there's very little risk associated with it that way. And again you'll want to check with your insurance agent at crop insurance agent just to make sure they understand what you're doing and that it can be an approved practice, but a lot of these insurance agents aren't aware of that and so you may have to kind of help them step through that a little bit.

58:50 Dale answered this question earlier but I think it's important to bring up. Janet Fisher asked when you say intercropped legumes won't provide enough nitrogen for the corn, is that because there out or it's because they don't get enough time or because you can't get enough legumes in there to give the corn enough nitrogen. And Dale kind of answered it's the fact that that nitrogen is for the next crop, but what benefits do you get from that legume?

59:19 Yeah, so there will be some transfer of nitrogen from a legume plant to a grass plant, especially if you have a highly colonized soil. You'll mycorrhizae colonization, that's the only way you're going to get nitrogen from a growing legume plant to a growing grass plant. That nitrogen will have to travel through the mycorrhizal network to get there. So if you've got good mycorrhizal colonization you will see some of that transfer. How much I don't know that anybody knows the answer to that. They've observed it in laboratory conditions, I think that we've seen it happen in fields. I don't know what that number is, but my gut tells me it's a relatively small number because again that legume plant, its number one priority is keeping itself alive, so it's going to keep the majority of nitrogen for itself. It will share some under right conditions, but it's still going to be a relatively modest amount. And then the other thing is, you know, it's a companion crop and so you've got a relatively low population, it's growing in reduced sunlight conditions and you're just not getting the full benefit of having a legume that's growing for a full season under great conditions. So all those things kind of add up to being a contribution but more modest.

1:00:44 Now I think the bigger contributions could come from, you know, like the picture of Chris Teachout with this cow peas. If you get a really good crop of cow peas rocking and rolling, there will be more contribution from that than, you know, from red clover that's only three inches high. And you got to remember you're also adding commercial fertilizer to this corn crop so that even the red clover isn't going to nodulate as much as if there was no nitrogen out there.

1:01:16 Yeah, that's exactly right. So for the organic guy who's not putting that commercial nitrogen out there, they probably have a better chance of making it work and they need it to work more because they don't have all of the other options for commercial fertility.

1:01:33 Well I appreciate your guys's time. It's 6:30 so we're going to close up here. I know there's plenty of other questions that continue to roll in. So if you guys have questions and would like to get those answered, you can email either myself or Keith at greencoverseed.com. Just our names, Keith and then my name is Noah at greencoverseed.com and we'll certainly answer those questions for you. And we'll try to loop Dean in on some of that too for his expertise. Thank you guys so much for watching.

1:02:08 Yeah, don't be afraid to go to our YouTube channel and watch that video from the 2018 and then while you're there, we literally have hundreds of videos on there and they're really good content. So take some time and look at those and then let us know if you have any questions.

1:02:24 Feel free to reach out anytime you guys have any questions, not even just on interceed but cover crops or soil health in general. We've got a wealth of information there. So next week we're going to talk about rescuing fescue with Dale Strickler. We might have some other speakers on there as well, so we're excited to hear about that. And with that I think we're going to close. Thank you guys so much, thanks Dean for your time.

1:02:49 Thank you Beth, thank you and everyone, you have a wonderful rest of day. Thank you.