Interseeding Cover Crops into Soybeans: How Alex Frasier Boosted Yields and Cut Inputs

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

0:15 Hey, you know, one of the best forms of flattery is to imitate. And a lot of the things that we do at Green Cover, you know, we'd love to take credit for, but we didn't really come up with the ideas. But we know lots of smart, innovative, creative people and we often look at what they're doing and then we try it on our own ground or we pass those ideas along to our customers. One of the new things that we tried this year was interseeding into soybeans and we had a limited trial of that and kind of liked what we saw and are definitely going to be doing more of it next year. But this is not something that we came up with. This is an idea that we have gleaned from some of the other people that we have the privilege to work alongside or to have contact with.

1:01 And so our guest today on the podcast, Alex Frasier from South Dakota, is one of those guys. Alex has been doing interseeding into his cover crops now for I think this is his sixth year. So he knows a lot more about it than we do and he's got some really good data. So Alex, welcome to the podcast. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

1:22 Appreciate it, Keith. Thanks for having me on.

1:26 Yeah, absolutely. So, just to give people a little bit of background, a little bit of context, tell us where in South Dakota you're farming, kind of how your farm is set up, crops that you're growing, some of those sorts of things.

1:38 Yeah, so we farm in right around Falton, South Dakota, which is, you know, north central South Dakota. I'm the fourth generation on my farm. Dad is, you know, controller operator on the farm and we grow corn, beans, and wheat. Wheat is more, it's not always a part of the rotation, but it's something that we try to get to a small grain at least. Along with that, I work as an agronomist for Independent Ag in South Dakota as well. I do some cover crop coaching for farmers for soil health in South Dakota as well. So trying to have my hands in a lot of different pots and learn and help people learn as well.

2:18 Yeah, that's that's great. You get to see what other people are doing and help integrate that much like what we do and that's really valuable. Any livestock on the operation, Alex?

2:29 For it's been probably 15 or so years, maybe even longer now. We had sheep when I was growing up and before that grandpa and dad had some cattle, but that's been quite a long time ago now. So it's been, yeah, I say that's 12. So that's been 19 years now since we've had any livestock.

2:45 Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, you know, one of the things that you're doing that I think is really unique is the interseeding into soybeans. And, you know, for many years, you know, we've been experimenting, people have been experimenting with interseeding into corn, you know, at V3 or V4 and wide row corn and narrow row corn and all of this. And for a long time I always said, well, we do it on corn because, you know, you can get some sunlight in. It's not going to be a harvest impediment because, you know, you're harvesting corn up here. It just isn't make sense with soybeans because, you know, anything that you grow in your soybean crop is could be a harvest impediment. Soybeans have a really tight canopy.

3:28 But tell us how you've been making this work. So, first of all, just tell us, you know, why you started looking at this interseeding into soybeans and then maybe just talk about, you know, what you're doing, how that's working. I can share a little bit about what we saw this year on our tiny little experiment that we did. But let's just talk about that because I think it's something that people will be very interested in because most of the interseeding.

3:55 Yeah. Yeah. So, it all really started when in 2017 Jason Mock came to South Dakota for the soil health coalition meeting and that's where I first saw relay cropping what he does and that kind of planted a bug in my brain of how can we do something like this farther north less rain less growing season and never really got anywhere with that for us. But in 2019, we signed up for the CSP program and we chose cover crops as an election and we planted cover crops behind soybeans on, you know, call it the 1st of October. Virtually a waste of time and money. But it checked the box to get the government payment and instead of doing that again over that winter came up with the idea to interseed with soybeans in the spring. So it's all planted at the same time. It's truly a nurse crop or a companion crop is the best way to term it. That would get you clearance with insurance with government programs that sort of thing. But what we do is we have an air seeder, a John Deere 1860 1910 air cart. So it's two tanks and two.

5:06 Ranks. And the front gang, we put down the inner seed mix, which is oats, rye, and flax. It's 18 lbs of rye, 10 lbs of oats, 3 lbs of flax. And then in the back gang, we put down the soybeans. So our air seeder is 7 and 12 inch spacing. So every seven and a half inches it alternates rows. It goes beans cover beans cover beans cover and then roughly 6 to 8 weeks after planting we spray it out and whatever is needed at that time to spray it out.

5:38 So a lot of years it's Roundup and it's 24D or it's Liberty 24D clethodm. You know it just kind of depends what weeds are there at the time we spray. I should say too in the fall we're using residual chemicals. So like we just put out a bunch of Valor here last week or two weeks ago in the fall so that we keep ourselves clean until planting with the goal of not spraying again for 2 months.

6:07 So then you're not doing a pre-plant spray. Your next spray is would be the post that you do on those beans to burn down whatever's there including the companion crop. That's correct. And at that time we'll layer in residual, you know, using something like Duel or Warrant or Outlook. But what we, the reason we're trying to go 6 to 8 weeks is because there's kind of three timings when you want to spray it out. If the oats starts to head, if you've got heavy dense weed pressure in a certain area of the field just go spray it out. Or if you know, those are kind of the two main timings you want to get it sprayed out.

6:47 I should say if your oats is jointed, we're getting a little higher carbon to nitrogen ratio in that residue, so it's going to stick around longer, but at harvest you don't see any of the remnants of it. It's been recycled back very quickly. And we're planting a winter rye, you know, a cereal rye in the spring, so it doesn't vernalize, which means it doesn't grow up. It stays kind of prostrate. Exactly. It grows more of like a little bushy plant on the ground. And it's really hard to tell the oats and the rye apart until that oat starts to bolt up a little bit.

7:20 And then the flax, you know, you don't think 3 lbs is a lot, but with flax seed, as small as it is, it looks like a giant part of the mix. And you see it all over through the field. That's what I call version one of the intercrop. This year we experimented by putting millet, Golden German millet in there, some safflower, and sugar beets. The reason being we're trying to use similar plant families to control the weed species that we're having issues with. Sugar beet for water hemp, safflower for Canadian thistle, and the millet for green yellow foxtail.

7:59 That would I would say was pretty much a failure with those three species. The sugar beet grew pretty well, but the safflower and the millet never really came. And I think that's interesting. I think it's planting timing. You know, we were in the last week of April, so pretty warm or pretty cool soil temps for those warm season, you know, broadleaf and grass. So I think that's the reason why. I was surprised that we never saw it come even later in the season, though. So I wonder if we'll see some next year in the corn.

8:30 Yeah, maybe. I mean, I can certainly understand that on the millet. Millet's going to need warmer soils to come up, but the safflower, you know, it should germinate in 50° soils. So yeah, I don't know. Well, I would encourage you not to give up on the safflower because it can be a really good plant if you can get it started. And we planted safflower with oats and flax and rapeseed in March and it will come up. So yeah, I would not give up on that. But I love the concept of, you know, utilizing plants, cover crops within a plant family with weeds that you're fighting.

9:09 And you know, I think that has a lot of merit. People have seen some results with that. So yeah, I would definitely not give up on that. It's some sort of environmental factor that's causing weeds to grow. Whether that's biology, whether that's moisture, temperature, bare ground, whatever it is, something's calling that plant in to grow. And I figured if we could satisfy the biological portion, we can maybe I don't think you can get rid of all the water hemp, for example, we're going after with the sugar beets. But I saw a pretty lesser instance of water hemp this year than what we've had in the past. And we had almost 29 inches of rain to, you know, from basically April 1st to today.

9:59 Wow. So you're fairly wet year. Yeah. And and you were doing those sugar beets because sugar beets are, you know, quite expensive, but you were doing that at really low rates, right? That's correct. At a quarter pound and kind of the reason, you know, the oats, rye, and flax, those are those levels were there because that you had to hit certain thresholds for the CSP program. Plus, I want cover.

10:20 Out of my rye and my oats. They're going to really pump a lot of carbon. They got a lot of benefits that we're going to get from having it a little bit denser population. But when I'm adding species into the mix, I was told you only need one plant per 10 square feet to be able to influence the biology in that area. So, that's kind of how we were picking the density. So, if I need one plant per 10 square feet, I need roughly 5,000 plants, let's call it, an acre. And so, that kind of led to how we were getting to our seeding rate.

10:53 Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's really interesting. Yeah. We'll have to try some sugar beats in next year. So, you know, and again, we just did a very small trial, you know, based on some of the things that we've read about or seen other people do, including yourself. And, and we did, you know, the oats and the rye like what you did and the flax, and those all I felt like worked pretty well. But we also included mustard. And we put the mustard in because it grows super fast. You know, mustard is really high in glucosinylates, which is a chemical compound that can both help suppress weeds, which is good, but it can also help suppress nematodes. Now, we didn't have high enough rates of mustard to be like a really strong pneumaticide type mix, but our thinking is is that, you know, could it have a negative impact on any soybean cy nematodes that might be out in that field? We don't know. But the mustard grew really well. It grew fast. It bloom super early and so we had mustard blooming out there quite early so that was bringing in lots of other beneficial and pollinator type insects whether it had an impact on any nematodes, you know, we're going to have to do a lot more research and studying to know that but we saw enough that we liked with it that we'll continue with some mustard and then the other one that we included too was buckwheat. Again it's an early bloomer we can get lots of, you know, pulling in lots of insects, but also from its ability to cycle phosphorus, make phosphorus available. And then you know when that buckwheat gets terminated and it dies, the hope is that that phosphorus will release. Maybe those beans pick up a little bit of that in growing season, but for sure it would be there for, you know, the corn the next year as well. So those might be a couple other ones you might want to slip in and try in varying amounts. I don't know if you'd considered those or not.

12:51 Especially the buckwheat I worry about. I don't want to have too many broadleaf species in the mix because I think that can be direct competition with the soybeans. I should explain a little bit more why we chose what what we chose.

13:04 Yeah, please do. The rye is in there. You know, you get the aliopathic effect which is going to help your small seated broad leaves that basically eradicated kosha on our farm outside of the areas that we don't plant. You know, we don't really have kosha. Oats. But you used to. Yeah. Kosha was our worst weed by far. It was very detrimental to us. And we've gotten rid of it basically in six years. I mean, we don't farm a lot of acres. We only have 900 acres. So, we can be very timely on our spraying. All that helps a lot tremendously, too. But getting, you know, plants out there to get cover so that we can take care of that one of those environmental factors of bare ground. We got we've got cover. Mother nature's is a lot less likely to call in weeds to grow. Yeah. Rye also does a really good job of using nitrates up which in soybeans early can be detrimental. You can get a lot of vegetative growth in soybeans. You get a big bushy plant. But, you know, I want to stack my nodes really tight together in a soybean plant. That's how you really influence yield. Um, oats is in there. It's good for microisal fungi. It has a good rooting structure, good early season growth. Another thing that will compete early in the season, get up and grow. Planted in cold temperatures, you know, where we're typically trying to plant April. That's, you know, just something to keep get growing right away. The other thing that oats can do is can act as like a fake host for white mold and can help reduce the instance of white mold in soybeans. Now, white mold is not something that we really deal with in our geography, but the other thing too is that we're growing at different times of the year. You know, white mold doesn't really show up until the end of the growing season more where oats is growing early in the season. So, I don't know how much effect that has on there, but I think there is some. And then flax is strictly in there for the microisal fungi association. That'll also bloom pretty pretty early, too. We'll see. Not every year I would say, but most years we'll see flax with little flowers on it as we go out.

15:13 The timing we're trying to hit is that

15:18 First 6 to 8 weeks of growth. That's about 60% of the carbon that any plant puts in the ground is in that first two months of life. So if we can get to eight weeks, then I think we've done about as much good as we can with our cover crop mix. And then we're trying to spray it out.

15:34 The other thing I forgot to mention earlier was that third timing on when to spray it out is if you got soybeans flowering, I want to take competition away once we hit reproduction. So I'll just touch up again on that. It's if our oats is heading, spray it out. If our beans are flowering, get it sprayed out. Or if you've got just dense mats of weeds, get it sprayed out.

15:57 And our biggest weed problem now is Canadian thistle. So that's something that kind of signals a calcium deficiency a lot of times is a Canadian thistle. I see that on our soil test, too. It's something that we've got to address. But I think that using all these different tools, whether it be residual chemical, plants, burndown chemical, kind of increases our ability to be successful in weed control.

16:29 So Alex, when you're spraying that out, are your beans pretty well canopied by that point in time or do you still have a little bit of gap there?

16:39 Yeah, every year we get questions like, why'd you spray out your wheat? And you know, you go from this lush green field from the road, it looks like an oat crop, and you spray it out, you turn the whole field brown, and you come back in a couple weeks, and those beans are popping through, greening up really nicely. So I would say you go through this. It's kind of a it's fun because your field is green in a soybean field where you'd typically have two three inch tall beans, you know, that middle of June time frame in our area. And we've got an entirely green field. We're capturing all the sunlight energy we can and then we go and spray it out and we let the beans go to work after that.

17:22 So you're spraying that out when those beans are what only 6 in tall, 8 in tall?

17:28 Yeah, like second, third trifoliate I would say a lot of times.

17:32 Okay. Have you experimented at all with a strip or two of just delaying that termination to see what it would do?

17:39 We haven't. No, we the first year in 2020, the first year we did it, we didn't order enough cover crop seed. So we had about 10 acres that was not intercropped. There was virtually no difference in yield. But what we noticed was the first node on the soybean was set about 3/4 of an inch higher. We had cooler soil temps.

18:04 Where where you had the companion crop?

18:07 Yeah, in the companion crop, we noticed a higher first node set, which should help with some harvest ease. We had the where the inner crop was, we had cooler soil temperatures and then where we didn't have the inner crop, we had to spray it a second time. So we've been able to reduce the amount of passes through the crop. Not every year, but there's been years where we've only have to spray the soybeans once in a growing season, but almost every year that second pass is just one product, whether it be 24D, whether it be Liberty or Roundup. We don't have to have the whole mix in the tank to try and keep the beans clean late in the season.

18:52 Yeah, that's a lot of where the savings have come from in terms of the chemical side. We still have I still want to be able to use all those things, but we use them in a lot less heavy doses. For an example, this year we did 16 ounces of Roundup. This was this had been the first pass when we sprayed the companion crop out. We had 16 ounces of Roundup, 32 of Liberty and 32 of Enlist. And then we came back with 24 ounces of Roundup the first week of August. So not even using barely over a quart in Roundup in a year and was able to keep the fields really clean.

19:30 So just the savings in chemicals alone is probably more than paying for the companion crop seed because at those low rates, that's not an expensive mix to put out there. Say on average over the last six years it's been somewhere between like 13 and 15 bucks an acre like that.

19:48 Yeah, know that's that that doesn't pay for many chemical passes.

19:54 And you got to think about too, you know, I use the term compounding positives. Every decision we make, especially if you look at it in a long-term window, if we can make one good decision today followed by another followed by another, I think in five 10 years time, that leads to really big changes. And while we don't know all the effects, the chemical has a negative effect on biology in the soil. There's it might be a necessary evil to you know to keep fields clean and have a successful farm but I think if we can reduce those instances just a little bit year to year that'll have big dividends you know in a decade. Yeah. And and I do want to just mention too, you know, for some that might be listening to this.

20:38 Who, you know, maybe are organic producers or want to get towards organic and they're going, 'Oh, well, this can't be for me because I'm not going to spray this chemicals.' We have customers, and actually, this is one of the first times we heard about this. We have a customer in Minnesota, an organic farmer, so he plants 30-inch soybeans, and he was planting mustard right down the middle of that 30-inch row. And then he comes back in with just an in-row roller crimper and he's crimping that mustard. Mustard will grow fast enough that it can get to a crimpable stage before the beans get very big. And so he was actually going through there and roller crimping that mustard down right between his rows and then the beans come on up through that.

21:19 So just again, just because you aren't, you know, in the same context as what Alex is here doesn't mean we can't learn things and adapt things to make it work within your own context. So I felt like that was pretty interesting how he was doing that and he was just doing straight mustard. But you know I would encourage him to experiment with buckwheat and oats would be great in that mix too because you could get that to a crimpable stage. Oats would and even flax. You probably won't kill that flax with a roller crimper, but a little bit of flax out there, even at harvest time, isn't going to bother anything.

21:58 Flax is such a submissive plant. It just kind of gives up to something else. I don't know what a full seeding rate of flax is. It's around 40 lbs. Is that right?

22:07 Probably 30 if you're going to grow it for grain, yeah.

22:10 Yeah. So at 3 lbs, you're talking 10% of a total seeding rate. You see it out there, it's all over, but it is not something that's really competing.

22:18 Yeah, it's not going to be competitive. And yeah, so I think that would be interesting to, you know, to do something like that to where, you know, we're not going to completely kill that flax, but, you know, once those beans kind of hit canopy, they're going to probably smother everything else out anyway.

22:35 Yeah, they do a good job. And we're 15-inch rows at the end of the year, so we've got we get to canopy really quick after we spread it out. I'd say it's usually in that 14 to 21 day range. We're at canopy again.

22:48 And at that time while those beans are rebounding from the chemical, you've got all of your residue from the intercrop mix that you just sprayed out. So it's still sitting there shading the ground. We're seeing, you know, we've had really, really good weed control since we've started doing this. The one of the biggest benefits that we've seen is actually the ability to reduce fertilizer because of what we're doing. It's not every year, but in 2021, we started taking Haney soil samples along with our traditional stuff and seeing measurable differences in carbon and available phosphorus after this soybean crop compared to a conventionally planted soybean crop.

23:35 So there's we've seen it one time, so it's not, you know, it's not the end all be all, but we've had an instance where we raised 78 bushel soybeans on a field and right next to it raised 203 bushel corn and we had more carbon. We had a higher weak score after a soybean crop than we did after a corn crop.

23:54 You almost never hear that.

23:56 It blew my mind when we first saw it. It just doesn't make sense. I've never seen it before. I haven't seen it since. But there's the ability to do some of those things. Now, obviously for us, that's an exceptional yield, especially in our area. I would say our farm average before we started intercropping soybeans like this, our APH is averaged across all of our fields was 39 bushel. Since we've started intercropping, our in those six years, if you just look at the APHs in that time frame, we're raising 52 bushel beans on average.

24:29 So we've seen a pretty drastic increase in yield and we see it in years where it's drier and we see it in years where it's wetter. So 2021, the first half of the year for us was really, really wet. A lot of snow, late planting. Our county average was 29 bushel and our farm average on a little over 500 acres was 48 bushel. And we saw a similar thing in 2023 where we had a lot of timely rains, a lot of rain in general, almost 28 inches. We saw a farm average for us a little over 500 acres again that year was 70 bushel and the county average was 51 bushel. So we've seen definite yield increases.

25:20 We've never seen it fall out of bed. We're not giving up bushels because we have it in there. I would say the biggest pushback we get is when people ask about moisture and we're typically, especially as you get into the older generation, we're always worried about rain. Rain's our biggest limiting yield factor almost every year. But my argument to that is that because I've got four times the biology, because each seed has got its own individual microbiome, so I'm

25:50 Bringing what is it roughly nine billion microbes per seed species. I'm getting 36 billion microbes out there compared to you with soybeans getting nine. And each microbe respirates moisture and carbon just like we just like I am right now talking to you. So, I think we actually build moisture in the system by having more plants out there. And I'm a big believer that in diversity over density when it comes to cover crop seeding. I don't think you need to have this super heavy rate to get a lot of benefits.

26:25 Yeah. Especially where your goal isn't to, you know, try to produce three tons of forage for cattle. You know, your goal isn't to try to bail up a whole bunch of hay. You know, your goal is to really supplement the biological diversity, suppress some weeds, cycle some nutrients. And so then yeah, the rates that you're using, which are, you know, inexpensive to do, are just about right. I want to go back, Alex, and I don't want to skip over this because it's a shocking thing that you said with the WEO score and for people that aren't familiar with the Haney test, that's the water extractable organic carbon. So, you're sending in a soil test. They're extracting how much organic carbon is in that soil through a water extraction. And that's a really good sign of how healthy your soil is. And it's almost never going to be higher in soybeans than it is with corn because corn is, you know, this big plant putting lots more biomass, lots more carbon into the soil than what we typically think of for beans. But I just want to make sure I heard you right. You said that you had higher organic carbon scores after the beans than you did after your 200 bush of corn.

27:43 Yeah. Which it was a little bit of an anomaly. Those were 78 bushel beans. We've never really sniffed that number again. You know, everything lined up perfectly for us. So, like I said, it's not something that I would suspect every single year, but it's something that I feel pretty confident that just compared to a regular planted soybean, I know I'm going to have more carbon in the ground after the inner crop than after just a regular soybean planted field, conventionally planted. For sure. And I know people that have even really gone back from how many soybeans they grow or even eliminated it because they feel like they're losing carbon out of their system from that soybean year because it is such a legume. It's a high nitrogen residue.

28:31 And it cycles fast and you can lose a lot of carbon by growing soybeans. And so what you're doing though is you're adding these other things in. Some of that carbon is coming from the above ground biomass. But you know, Christine Jones, you know, one of the things that just stuns me when I listen to her talk, she says that, you know, the carbon that's coming from the roots of those plants, 30 to 50 times more likely to become part of your organic matter than what the above ground biomass is going to be. So, a lot of that above ground biomass will, you know, go back to the atmosphere CO2. That's just part of the natural process, but it's the biology that you talked about is where you're getting your carbon.

29:15 Yeah, totally. And I think too that the beans and the mix have a symbiotic relationship. They're willing to swap biology to help each other and you know create a network that we talk about with mycorrhizal fungi. I think that it's not something that you snap your fingers and it's built, but you can incrementally become better and better and better. And Jay Fear up at Manoken Farms in North Dakota, the way he termed it is growing beans responsibly. And I think that might be the best way I've heard it described as, you know, this isn't going to fix all the negatives of soybeans, but it's going to lessen them dramatically. And I think you can improve yields, you can improve quality of your soil, you can reduce chemical, you can reduce fertilizer. You know, I think I said it earlier, but we've reduced our phosphorus 75% and our nitrogen 40%.

30:13 You know, since we've started this intercrop mix and it's through soil sampling, through tissue sampling, proving we've got really high plant available phosphorus. In 23 to 24, we grew 51 bushel soybean crop on a quarter. We used a product called Meltdown as in the fall to kind of help cycle some residue in the stocks. But we went from I think it was 21 lb of H3A phosphorus to 56 lb of H3A phosphorus. So 35 lbs in a single season we increased that amount of phosphorus which then this year we planted wheat on that and we didn't apply any phosphorus. We had 72 bushel spring wheat.

31:00 And you're applying that product on the corn stocks prior to soybeans, right? Okay. And so that's got a portion of it in terms of what we've released.

31:09 For nutrients, but I can prove it in other fields with just the soybean intercrop too. I think both of them together released a ton, but I see release in other instances as well. And when you have high organic carbon, nature brings nitrogen with that. When you've got high carbon levels, nitrogen comes for free with it. So if you can really drive high carbon levels in your soil, you'll get nitrogen for free because of it.

31:36 Yeah. And you know, I always used to think and I think this is probably fairly standard traditional thinking is that if you apply a product like what you're talking about on those corn stocks, you're basically ramping up the decomposition time frame, but what happens is that the biology is pulling nitrogen out of your soil. They're tying it up in order to break down those corn stalks. That's what I always kind of thought and I'm sure that's probably true in a lot of situations. But if you get the right product, if you get the right combination of microbes, they will actually pull the nitrogen out of the atmosphere in order to balance the carbon in those corn stocks. And so now you're getting not only a net gain of the phosphorus because you're cycling that faster, you're getting a net gain of nitrogen because it needs to get nitrogen to balance out all that high carbon, but it doesn't have to pull it out of the soil. It can pull you got 30,000 tons of nitrogen above every acre ground right?

32:37 And and so I think that's maybe some of what you're seeing too. I tend to agree with you and I think really what you're trying to do with those products is take that really complex carbon and break it down to the simple carbon that's easily exchangeable and that's what really drives the bacteria in our soils you know is that 3 to 5:1 carbon to nitrogen ratio runs all of our bacteria basically. So as you get into fungi and arthropods protozoa you need a much higher carbon to nitrogen ratio but you got to start somewhere right? So you got to just continue to build.

33:11 Yeah. So you're essentially composting right in the field. Trying to. Yeah. And it's, you know, the reason we tried the product was I wanted easier planting in the spring. You know, I really wanted that residue to turn black and go away quick. I just don't know if we've got enough season after corn comes out for us to do that. But we see the nutrient release pretty consistently. You know, it's just kind of a part of what we do now.

33:35 Yeah. So, a couple of other things I want to kind of make sure I catch here before we move on. So, how have you seen with the interseeding into the soybeans? Have you seen a difference in how those beans nodulate? Whether how early or how well do do you feel like that's having an effect on nodulation?

33:54 Absolutely. Yeah, we've so two years ago we started we went away with seed treatment. We still inoculate but we're seeing I would say most of the times it's two and a half three to one versus a check field or a check spot. So we see a ton more nodule simply because of the intercropping. I I think so. I mean I think you you supply more carbon to that root system, you can get a lot more productivity out of that plant. Now there might be a little bit of catch 22 with it because you can't you know you can't fix nitrogen in the presence of oxygen. So maybe we're doing a little bit of damage by overnodulating too. I don't know if you have an opinion on that, but it's I think we definitely have way way more nitrogen to feed the soybean plant than we need and we can have leftovers corn crop.

34:46 Yeah. In that sense, yeah, I mean the beans will self-regulate, but probably part of it is any excess nitrogen that would have been out there from the previous corn crop. You're tying that up in your rye and your oats. Yep. And then that's a signal for those soybean plants. Hey, there's no nitrogen in the soil because they can't see it if it's tied up in those other plants. So, they're they're, you know, they're starting to build those factories. They're starting to build those nodules early and often. And then with all of your other biology there, you probably got a really good support system. So, yeah, it's probably two things. It's the fact that you're sequestering all of your free nitrogen so the beans can't cuz they're going to, you know, they're lazy like me. They're going to take the easy stuff first. Absolutely. But if you tie all that up, you force them to go to work, which is what we want. And then you've got that carbon and biology out there as well. So, and one thing I really notice is the depth that, you know, most of the soybeans you dig up the roots on, the nodules are all like right around the base of the plant, right around the seed.

40:53 Wheat gets tough. But before this year we were all wheat and beans in 25, but the last time prior to that we had wheat was 2022. So I don't know if we'll grow wheat in the future. I think we're going to try and experiment with some rye instead. But yes, we plant cover crops afterwards. This year was very wet in that time of year, so we ended up just floating it on and drug it in. That worked pretty well for all the small seated stuff, but the sunflowers didn't come. But everything else grew pretty well. And in that mix, we had it was a total of 30 lbs an acre. So again, it's diversity over density in my mind, but we had half of that was spring wheat seed that we pulled out of the bin. We put daicon radish, flax, we had sorghum, we had millet, we had a little bit of cowpea in there, and then sunflowers would have been the sixth thing in the mix. And what I wanted was things that were all going to winter kill.

41:55 The daicon radish has got a little bit higher price tag than a forage radish, but it's a little less winter hearty. So that's the reason we went with something like that, specifically.

42:08 And then like how much growth did you get on that cover crop? You know, were you able to monetize that at all through grazing? What did that look like?

42:18 So, we weren't able to monetize it through grazing. We had growers that, you know, neighbors that said they would bring cattle and it just never ended up happening. As for growth, the wheat got to where some of it threw a head. So, we're talking 18 to 24 in tall. The millet and the sorghum got very similarly tall because it wasn't actually planted the growth pattern is very wavy through the field. So you see behind the where the combine spreader wasn't throwing it all the way, you've got great stands and it's a lot lesser through there.

42:51 You know, where there's good even after being dragged, you know, it still doesn't get you that perfect stand. But I would say we got every acre's got some growth with 90% of the acres have really good growth. So I'm very happy with it. It actually probably got taller, too tall. I'm a little bit worried about that for next spring. You know, we kind of wanted it to help us dry out the ground a little bit. Too much growth could be a little bit of a detriment to us, but we had hopes of getting cattle out there or some sort of hoof and that just didn't work out.

43:25 Well, you just go buy you 500 head of feeder cattle. They're pretty cheap right now. That—can I use your checkbook? Yeah, I'll have to check with my wife on that one.

43:36 Yeah, perfect. Well, you get back to me. Yeah, I'll let you know. But, you know, for the operator that does have cattle, I mean, that's a game changer right now because, man, you could be running feeders deep into the winter on a mix like what you talked about there.

43:55 You know, that was our whole hope is we'd get a 100 head and we'd stock it, you know, maybe give them access to 20 acres at a time and move them and they wouldn't be around very long, but just mob graze it down. And you know, we weren't even necessarily looking to charge anybody. I think if we could have just got that hoof action and the cow, the manure and the piss and the saliva, all that stuff, I think is more valuable than maybe a check they could have written to us anyways. So it have been great. I still think we got lots of benefits because that's still grass green right now as we talk today and we've got snow on the ground. It's the best grazing in the county because there's no pasture that looks that green right now. You just can't get any hooves around.

44:39 Yeah. Well, and down the road that could potentially change.

44:44 So I want to just move on and explore just a couple other topics here. So I mentioned earlier, you know, that most people that are experimenting with intercropping have been doing it with corn. Do you have any experience with doing the intercropping into corn? Do you plan on trying any of that? What's your thinking on that?

45:07 The only experience I have with intercropping in corn is with a customer of mine who's looking for grazing. We've tried he's tried a couple different scenarios where he did some 60-in corn and grazed that, you know, planted in there, cultivated it in, I should say, you know, just floated it on and cultivated in. That seemed to work pretty well in terms of the growth that he got, but it was a detriment to yield. But the following year, he did a barley and pea mix as a forage crop, and there was almost a ton and a half difference from where he didn't intercrop to where he did. So if you look at it through the window of a 2-year

45:51 It actually still lost him money compared to corn yield because his corn yield was around 160 bushel where it was, an intercrop was around 100 bushel where it was. So there was a pretty negative effect in yield, but he's really focused on the forage side of things for him. So if you stretch it out to a 2-year window, it turned out better than just what it looked like at harvest that year.

46:18 As for us, I don't we're 20-in corn, so I don't really foresee us doing any inner cropping there, and we don't have cattle to graze it. So that, you know, it just really limits the benefits for our farm. I think I do like the idea of having multiple species out there. I think that's great. I just don't know how to implement it for us to where it makes sense.

46:43 Yeah. And that's kind of what we've seen too is I think it makes a lot of sense to lean into it and try to figure it out if you're a guy with cattle and especially with prices. You can put that weight on those feeders, can be really really valuable. If you don't have livestock, it's a much harder stretch to say this is something I really want to lean into. I do think that a lot of the yield loss is mostly because of plant populations from what I've seen from what I've read and you know going from 30 to 60s. The twin rows on 60s is where guys are finding the least amount of yield drag. But when you just try to put all of your seed in a 60-in row, you just get those plants so close together. I do think that there's some yield drag there. So but we've, you know, worked with a lot of people that do 60-in corn and are, you know, saying that they have no to very little yield loss when they get those plant populations and spacings right. And I think there's probably a lot to do with the having the right hybrid, too. Something that will really have a big flex here.

47:49 Yeah. I think I've seen whether it be YouTube or different soil health classes, you know, there's lots of success stories with the intercropping corn. I just haven't quite had we haven't figured it out on this grower's farm yet as the best way to make it work for him.

48:08 So as you do your wheat or, you know, if you do rye, are you looking at some sort of interceding strategy with that as well? Well, this year was the first time that we ever tried interceding with a small grain. We put a pretty small amount of seed. It was six pounds total. It was three lbs of flax, a pound of crimson clover, and 2 lbs of a forage pee out there. The flax grew fantastic. The peas grew really well. Virtually no clover came, which I was kind of surprised by. And we didn't even see it come this fall when we've had, you know, a cover crop planted in there either. So that one I was a little bit surprised by, but that was again, it's just to the only real goal with that was to can I get this seed to germinate, share its biology, grow for a few weeks, and then we just sprayed it out. At the same timing that, you know, we had to go take care of weeds. We changed our wheat program a little bit in terms of chemical. You know, typically we'd use stuff like wide match or perfect match, that sort of stuff. We use just some 24D and some bermoxinil, you know, just a burner to have a wide open plant back for this fall so we could have multiple things in the mix.

49:36 If weeds weren't an issue out there, do you think that would have created a harvest issue? If you wouldn't have sprayed those companions out at all? No. I think the pee and the flax would have been mature at that point. Pea is typically coming out around the same time as wheat anyways. And two pounds of it is so minimal. Same with the flax. You know, flax would have probably all been seated out on the ground by the time we got there. So I don't I can't imagine that that would have caused much issue. If it was green, maybe, but I just don't see it being an issue.

50:09 Yeah. Especially at those at those lower rates. And so and so that's something to again consider. You know, if you're an organic producer and you know, you could still slip some of those in and at low enough rates, I don't think they'd be harvests issues. And you're doing that with spring wheat, but if you're in winter wheat territory, and we've had people do this, and we've done this when we grow cereal rye, for grain as well, you know, there's a lot of things you can put in in the fall, you know, radishes, flax, spring lentils, spring peas, get all your growth in the fall, and then they all winterkill. And then then coming out in the spring, you know, you've got just your cereal grain out there and then you don't have to worry about is it going to be a harvest issue? Am I going to get contamination in my grain tank? Depending on what your end market is.

50:57 That may or may not be a big deal. But you know, I just encourage people to think through what options do you have, especially when winter can be your friend, and just let it terminate your cover crop for you like what you're doing with your diverse mix after weed.

51:13 Let's work with mother nature instead of imposing our will all the time. You know, that's the ignorance of man is we just think we can manipulate everything, right? So if we work with it just a little bit more than we do today, you know, I like I said, I keep going back to it. I think over time we'll have we'll see these really large benefits and I think we're just kind of seeing those things now six years into it. We've got all the tools in the world to measure whether it be tissues, soil samples. Shoot, the best thing we've got is a shovel in our eyes. The power of observation is huge. And once people see this on their own farm, you know, guys just keep coming back to it, I guess.

51:55 So with the with the success that you've had with the interceding in your soybeans now for six years, do you have other people in the area starting to adopt that? Some of the clients that you're working with through Independent A, are they starting to kind of run a similar program or what kind of local adoption do you see? Yeah. So there's one grower, two growers in our county that have started to do it as well. You know, it's kind of one of those things where I think if I had a few more gray hairs and you get a little bit more reception from a few people, but I also think you know, there's little bit of an attitude of you don't want to think you're doing something wrong. You know, trying something this is definitely an out-of-the-box idea for the conventional farmer.

52:44 But for in South Dakota, I know of 9,000 acres that I consulted on this year that were planted this way. There was some growers that are just out of my geography that that also did it. There was growers in Nebraska, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin who all tried it as well. So there's becoming a little bit of adaptation. I'd say South Dakota for sure where I've been able to go and meet guys and explain the program has definitely been where I've been most successful.

53:18 Well, and I think is, you know, this to me this is a pretty low risk low cost low risk because if you're going to spray your beans out anyway, you know, you don't have to worry about this becoming a harvest issue. You don't have to worry about grain tank contamination, you know, like like you were saying, you probably are only going to have, you know, maybe $10 to $15 at the most of seed invested into this. Well, most people can afford to do that. And it's, like I say, it's very low risk. Do that on 40 acres out of an 80 acre field and just compare. Do a side by side, see what happens. That's it's a great way to get started. Low low investment, low risk. So yeah, I I think it's a great way for people to start experimenting with diversifying within that corn bean rotation and trying to start to build that biology and build that carbon which beans have always been really weak at. And so it's exciting to know that that could be a possibility.

54:17 The only really the only real barrier to entry I would say is if do you have an air seedeater? You know, that really makes it the easiest having something that you can segregate the cover crop versus the soybeans. I do think there's a benefit to having them in separate rows. I think if you have it all in the same row, you're probably going to have to spray it out earlier. And you said you did it in 30 inches and then came back. I don't I don't love that because the time the wear and tear, it takes a lot of the benefits away, you know, in terms of saving you time and money. But I do I think it's great to experiment on that until you feel comfortable and you want to do it on more acres, too.

54:59 Yeah. And and I'll just quickly share what we did. We just planted our beans, you know, with in 30-in rows with a regular planter. And then we just I don't know, my brother went on Big Iron, bought a super treat, super cheap grain drill, just a 15 ft drill, and we just slid the units over to where we could go right down the 30-in rows and not run over anything. And we just drilled in I think three rows in between each 30-inch row. Now from a large scale perspective, you know, that's not going to be the answer. If we want to do thousands of acres, but hey, if we want to do 40, 80, 120 acres next year to really experiment with, you can cover that with a 15 ft drill. That's not not that big a deal. So that's what we did. Like I say, it was just a cheap grain drill, kind of wore out. So we didn't have to spend a lot of money on it. We're not looking for precise seed placement. We're just wanting to get it in the ground and get it covered up.

55:56 And it worked pretty good for that. And then once we see if it's going to work or not, then you figure out how do we make this work at a larger scale. That's one thing I should mention too is when we're seating this, we're putting the inner crop mix at about 3/4 of an inch just to like you said, just skim it in. And then we're planting our beans at about two inches.

56:19 I think there's a lot of things. There's a lot of research out there with planting depth on soybeans and planting date on soybeans really influencing yield. So we're trying to chase that a little bit. And I want that cover crop growing as fast as possible. And one other thing I want to mention, too, is and you know, for your audience, it's probably not this isn't a revelation, but soil health is not a one-year fix. You know, this is a long-term.

56:45 You know, if you try this one year and you're like, 'Oh, I didn't see anything in yield.' We're not really doing it for yield. Yield is a consequence of good decisions in my opinion. So this is something where we're trying to improve the quality of the ground, which will in turn return us dollars eventually. You know, I think it's you got to look at this through a five, seven year window to really reap the benefits of it.

57:09 Yeah. I like that what you said. Yield is a consequence of good decisions. And I would go even further and say profit. Profit is going to be, you know, because sometimes we can grow yield to not be profitable.

57:22 Totally. And sometimes it's a different set of decisions. But what I like about what you're doing, Alex, is that you're leaning into the profit because you're increasing your yield, but at the same time, you're decreasing your inputs. And that's the only way that we're really going to become more profitable is you got to work both ends of the profit spectrum, which is decreasing cost and increasing revenue.

57:46 The only thing we control as farmers is the cost to raise a bushel. We don't even control what crops we can plant in our county because what's insurable. You know, we control weather, plant dates, none of it. So you can control what you spend on a bushel. You can't save yourself to prosperity, but you can be really judicious about how you spend your dollar. Yeah.

58:06 Refocusing fertility chemistry to be more poignant, like more targeted on each pest or symptom, whatever the problem is on your farm. And I think things like this are really, like you said, low barrier of entry.

58:20 Yeah. No, I love that. So as we wrap up here, let's say somebody's listening to this and says, 'Hey, I really want to get started doing that.' What just one or two pieces of advice you would have for someone who's going to get started doing either this type of system or something similar just to dip their toe into regenerative practices.

58:41 This isn't my original advice, but it's the best one I've heard it. Just do it. If you've got an idea, just do it. You know, it's make it something that you're comfortable with in terms of the scope of it. But for us, the first year we tried this, we planted 430 acres of it. We did every single acre of beans for us outside of those 10 acres where we ran out of seed. So we like to say we jumped into a pool with no water and somehow came up swimming. So I'd just say do it. There's no idea that's, you know, as long as you've got a why, what are the reasons behind why you're doing it. Don't just experiment for experimenting sake. But I think that if you have the if you have the understanding of why you want to do it, what results you're looking for, you know, the other thing I would say is don't look at yield as the only thing that is a benefit.

59:33 Yeah. Can I release more nutrients? Can I reduce weed pressure? You know, can I have a little bit better soil structure? Those are all markers that might not directly relate to yield.

59:45 Yeah. How's it affecting that next year and two years after it? So how's it affecting the system? I really like that thinking. So well, this has been a great conversation, Alex. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences, the information that you have there and hopefully this inspires a lot of people listening to this to go out and just do it. So thanks everybody for listening to the Green Cover podcast and go out there and regenerate your soils for your future generations.

1:00:11 My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska, but we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops. That's why we build green cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations. Patience.