When and How to Terminate Your Cover Crop

0:10 Oftentimes we get questions on terminating, as far as if they want to get the full benefit of the cover crop, when should they be terminating? I know Dale, your answer is already.

0:21 Gonna be depends but what is your guys's general rule of thumb as far as how do you plan to terminate your cover crop?

0:32 Well I mean it used to be, well the advice I've given historically anyhow.

0:40 Has been either get it brown and crispy when you plant or to plant green and it's when you kill a cover crop with herbicide and it's half dead and it's limp and raggy that's when you seem to have mechanical.

1:01 Planting issues. If it's been dead for a week or more and it's nice and crispy, that's easy to plant into. If you're planting green, that again the plants are full of water, they're crisp.

1:20 Colders and everything will cut through it and that's easy as well. It's in between where you have issues now. I guess a special situation though, and there's all different kinds.

1:35 Of things that can happen in any of the above situations. If you kill too early and you get a rain, then you can be stuck there because it's going to take forever to dry out, whereas if you plant green the plants.

1:53 can be pumping that water out of the profile and dry it back up, but when you plant green there's some risks involved with that as well. And some of those risks involve insect and disease issues.

2:27 That's been an issue in places. Cutworms or armyworms sometimes will transfer from especially a cereal grain to corn or sorghum, and so something that you might want to keep an eye out for.

2:47 There's a reason they say that the farmer's footprint is the best fertilizer. Be constantly out there looking for issues. Almost all these issues are rather easy to deal with.

3:02 If you catch them early and can be nightmarish if you catch them late. And you know it took us 7,000 years to figure out how to farm with tillage and no cover crops in bare soil. We've only been doing this cover crop.

3:19 No-till thing for really about 10–15 years now, most of us or less. And so there is a learning curve and there are a lot of problems sometimes we don't anticipate. That's one reason why it's good to get on webinars like this and get on our website and get on discussion groups and learn about what other problems and successes people are having so that you can repeat the successes and head off the problems.