Winter Annual Monocultures and Specialty Mixes: Field Day Tour

0:10 This is kind of interesting here, these two plots and I'm not going to talk about the species here because I've got to repeat it down there. I'll talk about them down there, but these two strips when we pulled in here with the drill we dumped this in because this is what I intended to plant first and then I realized my drill will set two plus inches deep and those 750 drills are a little hard to change the depth on, so I knew I needed it that deep to plant my large seed and stuff. So we went ahead and just planted this set of small seeded things out at two inches deep and you know it's probably not as good a stand as down there where I had it set about three-quarters of an inch.

0:49 But I wanted to show you that even though this stuff got planted two inches deep you could still get quite a bit of it to come up even from that depth with these small seeds and particularly we're in there, they're in a mix. You know, we get people asked all the time how deep can I plant these small seeds? Well, the answer is you can plant them relatively deep, get them down to some moisture and still get a pretty good stand to come up, especially in a mix.

1:12 None of these mixes, these are all kind of kept separate between small seeds and large seeds just so we can kind of look at things a little bit better, but I just wanted to show you that you can plant these things a little deep sometimes and you'll still get a pretty good stand. We'll talk about these species later on when we get over here to this side.

1:33 These two strips here are 44 HP's oats and Baldy safflower and again we were to kind of doing an experiment here that we're really not going to be able to get much data collection off of because of the poor stand. But this side was treated with an AC treatment that we call Byazo, and what that is, it's a combination of several organisms, the two main ones being Azotobacter and Hazel spore alum, and those are two bacterias that can take atmospheric nitrogen, they can convert it to plant-available nitrogen just like Rhizobia do, but they don't have to associate with a specific legume. They can trade that nitrogen to any plant, grass plants in particular, in exchange for the carbon that the grass plant will provide.

2:26 And so you would say, well, how comes we're not using that on all of our corn and never fertilizing corn? And the answer is these guys are only going to produce 20 to 40 pounds of nitrogen per acre, so it would never be enough to grow a really good corn crop. But think what 30 or 40 pounds of nitrogen would do for a cover crop or for a forage crop. Sometimes that's all you really need to make a pretty significant difference.

2:53 Now we don't really see that much of a difference here, but I don't think I was in a nitrogen deficient stage. We did not apply any fertilizer here, but at the same point, we didn't harvest a crop off.

3:04 This last year either. So essentially even though we had cover crop lots out here, it was essentially kind of like a summer fallow. So I probably had enough mineralized nitrogen, you know, to where things aren't looking nitrogen stress. So again, that's a product that we're evaluating. It's relatively inexpensive. A full rate of this is only going to be about three bucks an acre. And so if we can even produce, you know, 15 or 20 pounds of nitrogen through those organisms for three bucks an acre, it's definitely going to be worth it. It's something new that we're trying this year. So, you know, stay tuned. We're going to have some better situations than this to collect some data on.

3:46 One of the things I want to point out on this particular plot looking at these species is this safflower. I don't know if you're familiar with safflower plants at all, but normal safflower is a very spiny, almost thistle-like plant, especially as it gets mature. This is a particular variety called Baldy. It was developed by Montana State several years ago as a spineless safflower. So these leaves are going to be much like a sunflower leaf in that they don't have any spines at all. So even at full maturity, you could grab this safflower with your bare hands and not come away with a handful of thorns. You cannot do that with any other safflower variety.

4:26 Safflower is grown for the seed head. It produces an oilseed just like sunflowers do. You've probably all cooked with safflower oil, and that's what it's coming from. We think that this is going to be a good grazing plant because of its spineless nature. And so we purchased the rights for this. So the only place you can legally buy Baldy safflowers from us because we own the variety now. And we think it's going to be a pretty good one. We've been trying to get our seed production acres up. We've got a decent supply this year, and we'll have more coming on in the future. So that's the Baldy safflower.

5:01 We'll look at the other types of safflower over here. It's still vegetative, so it's not too sticky or thorny yet, but it will get there. So Baldy safflowers are one that we think is going to be a really good one for grazing mixes.

5:22 This is the regular safflower, and again, if you feel it, I mean, you can still handle it because it's still fairly immature. But if you look at the plant, you can start to see where it's starting to form all those little thorns and all those thistle barbs. Though they'll be coming on pretty strong. I've had guys from the Dakotas where they grow a fair amount of safflower. They've actually told me that sometimes if guys are calving kind of out in the open, they.

5:51 Will plant a border of safflower around the calving pasture because when the safflower gets a sure and you've got thirty or forty feet of it, they said a coyote won't run through that. I mean it's that prickly. So the Baldy plant is going to be a nice one to use for some of those things.

6:10 Another plant I want to point out here is this chickling vetch. Chickling vetch is a kind of a unique legume plant in the fact that there's no commercial value to the seed as far as a livestock feed because this seed actually contains neurotoxins, so you cannot feed this to animals or you'll kill them. So you don't want to do that. So the value of the seed is the plant. It was developed specifically as a cover crop as a green manure cover crop because it's a very, very good nodule aiding plant, and the number of different root exudates that this plant puts out into the soil is higher than just about any other type of crop. We'll try to carefully hand this around. You can really see the nodules coming on. Even though this plant is young, it's got really good nodulation. So it's one of the best nitrogen fixers that you can plant in the spring as a cover crop. It's very unique in that it has characteristics of vetches, it has characteristics of peas, and also some grass-type characteristics. And sometimes if you Google it, you'll see this labeled as grass vetch vine, and because it's got characteristics of all of those. And if you've ever seen the seed, you would swear that I was selling you a handful of road gravel because it's angular seed, it's different shapes, it's different sizes, it's different colors, just looks like a handful of gravel. But it's a really good nitrogen-fixing green manure cover crop, very popular amongst the organic folks because of its ability to produce nitrogen.

7:54 And then I also want to look at fava beans. Fava beans are another spring legume crop that we've been looking at fairly closely the last several years. Fava beans have a great root system, and it's the only true bean plant that will tolerate cold, wet soils. All the other beans need to have much warmer soil. So this is the only bean plant that you could plant either in the spring or later in the summer and get much fall growth on, but mainly it would be a spring planted crop. It's got a great root system, and the fact that it not only has a pretty decent tap root but it also has pretty nice lateral roots. You can see how that root system is developing, not only down but it's got really extensive lateral root systems. And there's some nodules on this. This isn't as good as I had one for an earlier group that had really good nodulation out on these side roots. Fava beans are going to grow well in those.

9:04 Cool soils as it gets hotter these things are going to kind of speed up through their life cycle a little quicker so I don't know that we could grow these for seed production here very well we get too hot too soon up in North Dakota where they can grow them pretty well these things will get five to six feet tall and they may yield to 80 bushel on fava beans down here you know we've never tried harvesting them for seed but I've never seen these get more than about three feet tall down here it's just a matter of the heat coming on too quick for a cool season plant but you can see they've got nice white flowers they're a pretty little flower.

9:42 The biggest thing against the fava beans over the years has been seed size because these are used in the human consumption market anything for human consumption they try to breed larger seeds because they're easier to process for the cover crop market we want a smaller seeds as possible so that when I sell you a pound of seed you're getting as many plants per acre as possible so these are small seeded fava beans but there's still about 1,500 to 1,600 seeds per pound which is about what corn is if you just think of the size of corn kernels that's about what these are and that's small large seeded fava beans can be five to six hundred seeds per pound which is essentially like a Lima Bean so those big ones don't work in mixes very well at all these smaller seeded one tend to go through a grill and work much better so and again we've gotten the price down on fava beans because we found some better growers growing these small seeded varieties like right now fava beans are like $0.50 a pound or something where a couple years ago they were 75 or 80 cents so that's something if we can continue to get that seed size bred down and get that price dropped a little bit we'll push these fava beans in these spring mixes even more any questions on those.

11:02 And there's a lot of things here that we don't have time to necessarily look at but some of them are just pretty common things like oats and spring triticale and this mix right here I believe this is the one that has the Admiral peas elbow on rye and sunflowers this is kind of interesting because normally Elbon rye is a winter cereal and it normally wouldn't give you a lot of growth without going through a vernalization period but this looks pretty darn good so far we'll continue to watch this and we don't know if it got cold enough in April to where this plant actually vernalizes and so it's going to just give us the fall you know it'll get four or five feet tall like rye normally does like what you saw over there or if this particular variety of rye doesn't have to vernalize to give you quite a bit of growth this is a very growth rye in the fall so we may be seeing that but

12:06 Nonetheless I guess what this shows me is that we could plant some spring planted rye like this and still get some pretty decent grazing. I don't know, that's something we're still looking at and trying to determine, so we'll watch this and let it grow and see. And then of course sunflowers—we like sunflowers a lot. We use a lot of sunflowers in our mixes. Sunflowers are the cheapest taproots you can put in the ground, you know, for forty-five cents a pound and you only need a pound or two an acre, and you can almost never dig up a sunflower in moist soil without finding more worms love to congregate around these big sunflower ribs. And so unless somebody absolutely says no, I don't want sunflowers because I had to cut them when I was a kid, we almost always put sunflowers in our warm season mixes because they're cheap and they've got a great taproot. And at this stage, these would graze very well. The ladybug hanging out right on that one there too—got a ladybug and worm just on this one.

13:08 So from a biology standpoint they're great. From an economic standpoint they're cheap. From a taproot standpoint they're very good. And like I say, at this stage cattle would graze these quite well. They'll eat them vegetatively like this. As they get a little older, the sunflowers, as it gets a little more mature, they would start just picking leaves off. And if this is allowed to go to head—these are black oil seed sunflowers—so if this makes a head, the seeds in that have 40% oil content, and that's a great energy source for the winter. So we'll use a lot of sunflowers in mixes where you want to plant them in the summer but you're not grazing until the winter because these things will get completely mature. So there's not a lot of forage value in the vegetation, but there's going to be good forage value in those heads because they'll eat those—they'll eat those oil seeds all winter long, and it's a great source of energy for them. And you'll also see a lot of birds and a lot of mice and crickets and everything else cleaning up the volunteer seeds from your sunflowers.

14:19 Well, you know, I've always said not many, but we had a field that did have some volunteer this spring. That's the first time I've really seen that. Probably depends a little bit upon how much biological activity, because I guarantee you, at 40% oil, if you're a mouse or a cricket or a beetle of any kind and you find something that's 40 percent oil, that's a big deal for you. You're going to take that. So I would say the more biologically active your environment is, the less you will see. And it makes a big difference if your grazing cat—because cat likes it. Cattle, if they can find them, they'll eat them, you know. They'll eat those heads and consume that. So they're probably gonna be some—these, and again, these are not wild ditch type sunflowers that you know.

15:06 Are hard to kill. These spray out pretty easily too. So even if you do have some volunteers, it's not going to be like trying to control just a common sunflower that grows in your ditches and has the tiny little head because those sunflowers have almost no oil in those seeds and so those don't get consumed by the mice and the crickets and the bugs and everything, whereas these high oil seed ones do tend to. So you'll see some but I don't think we've ever seen it be an issue.

15:43 If you graze the sunflower early in the year it's probably not going to grow back well enough to have good seed production. So you need to either do one or the other. And the other thing is these are—I would not plant these sunflowers here for seed production because these are not a hybrid. These would be the second generation out of a hybrid and so that's why they're cheap, is because we can plant a hybrid, harvest, sell you that seed for forty-five cents a pound. If I was going to plant a field for seed production that seed's gonna cost me seven or eight dollars a pound because it's a male-female cross to get that F1 hybrid, which is what you plant because it's gonna have much larger heads and much better seed production. And you're only planting about four pounds an acre at a full rate. And so if you want to do production on them you want to spend the money and buy the hybrid. As a cover crop, the cheap ones are fine because you don't need to get twenty-five hundred pounds of sunflowers break.

16:46 Boulton, any comments on sunflowers? Doing great, been doing great, thanks.

17:10 These next set of plots here, what we call our milpa garden mixes. Milpa (M-I-L-P-A) is a term that I read in a book called 1491. And this guy basically wrote a history of the Mesoamerican or Native American cultures—what would it look like before Columbus came. And one of the terms that he described in there that the Mesoamerican Native American Indians would have been using was a milpa garden or a milpa field. And it simply was a field where they would have six, eight, ten, twelve different vegetable species all growing together and then they would just harvest whatever grew for food production. So, kind of like the three sisters concept of corn, beans, and squash but with lots of other things added as well. So we kind of adopted that term. And these aren't—if you look at this, you can harvest a lot of food off this. You probably don't think that necessarily. The cool season ones aren't nearly as good because what we're trying to do with this is we've established a program where if you want to plan an AP

18:21 Or two of these garden type mixes if you have an agreement or an arrangement with a food bank or a food pantry or something like that will give you the seed and then it's up to you to try to get it harvested and get it to the food bank to get it to the people that need it. Well, with these leaf type crops, you would have to be out here every two or three days kind of harvesting these leaf greens to really make it worthwhile and that just doesn't work out for most people.

18:46 So we put these out here just to kind of look at and evaluate, but the most popular way of doing this would be to plant the warm season varieties, which have a lot of squash, pumpkins, melons, cucumbers, Calpis, okra—things like that. And those you only have to harvest several times throughout the year instead of several times a week to really do it right.

19:11 So we've had some pretty good success. They've harvested quite a few pounds of produce down in Oklahoma and gotten it to the local food bank. So you can kind of walk through here and look. There's just a variety of different things. There are some beets growing out here, there's some different kinds of lettuce, you know, looks a lot like the lettuce that you buy at a store. So, you know, we're experimenting. They're supposed to be spinach in here, but I can't find in spending so I don't know if my that seat wasn't any good. But if you look, there's some beets out here, there's turnips, there's kale, there's collards. So a lot of this would just simply be harvesting the greens, and if we had a bottle of ranch dressing or something here, we could all go to town and have a little appetizer first course here.

20:00 But again, the mill foot garden concept is it's much more effective when we plant the warm season, and we'll plant that here later this week all that that you see sprayed out behind us in that Ryback there. We're going to roll that ride down and plant those warm season garden mixes back there and see if we can't get a fair amount of that Viney type vegetable crop production.

20:39 I want to show you this because I actually did do this on purpose. Some of these mess ups out here I wasn't even trying to do, but this one I actually did on purpose. Basically, where I'm standing here does the exact same mix as what's over here. I just doubled the seeding rate of this versus that, and I wanted to show you that because we have seen this before. When you plant brassicas too thick, they will not do nearly as well. So I would say that this plot over here is probably six to eight pounds of brassicas per acre. This is probably twelve to sixteen pounds over here—way too thick. Brassicas accumulate sulfur and nitrogen very, very well, and they need that to grow, and over there they're getting.

24:54 Some of those early blossoms but we can stretch that out as well and then over here anything that's blooming white is a radish. Radishes have a different mechanism that triggers reproduction—they simply are looking at our days getting longer or our days getting shorter. If the days are getting longer, these radishes are going to bloom, they're gonna bolt and bloom and try to make seed. If the days are getting shorter, so these are planted in July in August, they would start forming that big radish taproot that you see all the time. So all the white blossoms are radishes, all of the yellow blossoms here are mustards.

25:32 But there is another type of radish here, this is called Grasso radish. And this Grasso radish will grow vegetative far far longer than what the nitrile radish does. So if you want a spring planted radish to graze, you need this one and not the nitrile radish because these will eventually bolt but it may be another five or six weeks before we see these start to flower. So they'll grow for a far longer period of time. They cost twice as much because production—it's owned by one company and they don't produce very much seed so the production, the supply is pretty tightly held. But if you want a spring planted radish so it doesn't bolt, this is the one to go with.

26:21 Lots of other things in here. I've got flax and a lot of my mixes because I like flax. Flax is cheap, it is a plant that is never going to take over a plot, but yet any time we put flax in a mix it's almost always there. So it's not overly competitive but it also does not get crowded out very easily. Relatively inexpensive seed, it's fairly small seed, and it's fairly—it's a very durable residue. You know, that's a pretty tough stand. There's a lot of lignin in there. This is not something that cattle are going to graze at all, and that's not necessarily a bad thing because sometimes we need something left after the cowboy gets done having the cows in there. You need something left yet. So for that reason we like flax. It stands well after it freezes out. I say it doesn't have a huge blossom but it will bloom and it's got a nice little blue flower as you can see at different places here. So we'll put it in our pollinator mixes as well. We use a lot of flax, and just a couple pounds an acre is all we normally would do. You don't need a lot of it but it's a nice plant to have in there.

27:33 Now the African cabbage. African cabbage is another type of Brassica. It is a little bit like the radish in the fact that when it senses days getting longer, it's going to try to go reproductive. It doesn't go reproductive nearly as fast as the radish. As you can see, this is just kind of starting to bolt and form some blossoms here. Cabbage is pretty distinctive—it almost always has a purplish tinge, particularly down.

28:04 At the base of the stem here, but it's somewhat unique in the Brassica family in that it's going to grow. It's the tallest growing Brassica, but it's also the one that will retain its residue the longest. So when these plants would freeze out in the winter time, radishes and turnips and a lot of those things, they just kind of melt away and there's not much left. These things will, and I've seen cabbage you know four or five feet tall, they'll stand all winter long. They'll hold on to their leaves quite well throughout the winter.

28:34 So as a snow catching crop, you know, if you put just a little bit of this in a mix and you have these kind of every so often standing up, it's kind of a taller bushier type plant. They're going to knock some snow down and do pretty good. They do have pretty high protein content, but they're not going to be real palatable for the cattle. They have a if you choose some of the leaves, it's got a real kind of a horseradish she tastes, and that's a it's pretty high in glucosinolates, which is a chemical compound which gives that bitter pungent flavor.

29:10 But it also when this decomposes in the soil, that releases the cyanide type gas, so it can help control nematodes. So we've got we'll make some mixes with some of these hot mustards. We've got some hot radishes, and we'll use some of this cabbage. And like a potato producer that has a bad nematode problem, they'll let that grow up as big as he can get it. They'll come in and he'll shred it and then immediately incorporate it with a disc of some sort.

29:39 And as those brassicas break down and decompose, they release the cyanide gas which will kill the nematodes. That kills the other biology too, so it's kind of a it's not necessarily something you would do unless you had a real severe nematode issue, which a lot of the potato guys do because potatoes being a root crop are real susceptible to nematode. So we don't necessarily use it for that, but some of the other properties are a really good fit.

30:08 One other thing I want to show you in this plot, it's new and something new that we are looking at this year, and that's if you see all these plants that have all these little yellow tiny yellow flowers, these are medics. And I've got in three different plots or three different types of medics. We've got Burr Maddox, Barrow Maddox, and then there's snail medics down there. The snail medics have quite a bit larger seed head or seed pod here. We don't know much about these yet. We're just evaluating these. Is this a seed I got in from Australia? But what I've observed so far is they're probably not going to get much bigger than this because they bloomed or there are blooming. They're already setting seed pots, so they're going to be a pretty short duration. This is going to be quite hard seed, so you know I probably will have volunteer medics out here for several.

30:58 They established much better in these mixes in this short time frame, much better than clovers. And that's kind of what we're looking at because we've always been disappointed with spring planted clovers in a mix—they're just slow to get going and don't establish as fast as we'd like. So we're looking at these medics to see if they can be affordable enough, if they're going to turn into a weed issue for us. We don't know.

31:26 Christine Jones said this is a very staple crop in Australia for grazing sheep on high protein, and they're one of the few things that will grow well in the wintertime. Now wintertime is probably more like our fall in that part of Australia—they don't get real cold—but she says they graze a lot of sheep on a lot of medics. Does anybody in here ever do anything with medics or tried medics or anything knowing about it? You probably know no more than I do because I don't know very much.

31:57 Well, I say it's something that we're looking at. We'll kind of keep you posted if we learn earth-shattering things with these. I think it's going to be cheaper than clover. The seed size is going to be a little larger than clover. I only got fifty-pound bags, so the freight and everything was—I don't have a good feel for seed cost yet. It's going to have to be cheaper than clover to make it work because it's got larger seed size.

32:40 Wander around and kind of look and ask questions. This really pretty strip here has all of the—you know, I've got yellow flowers and white flowers and purple flowers and all sorts of different things, blue flowers. This is what we call our cool season pollinator mix. And one of the things that we promote, and some people are doing, is they would plant the strip like this kind of up along the edge of the field, maybe a strip up through the middle, around a pivot point or something like that—basically to be an insectary strip where it will provide habitat for some of these beneficial insects. And if you walk through here you'll find a lot of ladybugs, there will be some lacewings flying around, a permanent amount of insect activity right in this area.

33:29 The theory being is if we have, say, corn or soybeans growing in the rest of this field, well, when the aphids come in to attack that—if I don't have a population of ladybugs nearby or other things that would eat aphids, it's going to take a lot longer for me to build up those natural predators to the aphids. And so by the time my predators get built up, they may have—or the aphids may have caused economic damage to my crop. So the theory here is if we can provide some habitat and I have a population nearby, these things can increase their populations quite quickly too, just like aphids, but I have to have the starting population somewhere close.

34:10 Trying to evaluate how effective this can be at providing that habitat. This is going to be relatively inexpensive compared to like I just did a quote down a CSP or a CSPD pollinator mix for a customer just one acre, but it was all the native type pollinators about two hundred and fifty bucks an acre. Now that strip will be there in 30 years, yes, because really good native long-lasting plants, but it's going to take a while to establish and it's quite expensive. You can do something like this for 30 bucks an acre and then you can move the strip around from year to year or wherever you want it. So each one kind of has its own fit and each one will do something a little bit different.

34:53 So there is even some other types of flowers in here. There's some buckwheat. Buckwheat does not survive any frost, but this stuff came up late enough. Those late April frosts did not take it out. This plant April 12. I mean, you could plant this firmly. Lacy's busters we've got to bloom, you know, all throughout the year. The later that you plant it I would switch over and we've got a warm season mix that would have a lot of buckwheat, sunflowers, cow peas, things like that.

35:26 So the goal is to get these flowering before your crops would flower or be under attack. So the sooner the better you'd want to plant this. And this is why this is almost all cool season crops except I threw a little buckwheat in to see what to do. You know, you would want to get this planted when you have soil temperatures in the low 40s because this will all come up at that soil. And to try to get these flowering population, now ideally right next to it you would come in when you have 65° soil temps and plant a warm season mix that will flower later in the year. So that way those insects always have a source of pollen, always have a source of food.

36:09 One last plant I want to show you and then I'll kind of turn you loose to wander around. And that is a plant called sulla. Sulla, and again it's a clover type plant. This one actually came from Italy. Company from Italy wanted to send me some to try, so I said sure, send it over. And it's, yeah, it's just kind of looks like a clover, but it's got really big leaves like that. And again, I don't know much about this plant. Brent had it in his plots down at Oklahoma and it did quite a bit better than the clovers as far as establishing early and growing faster. We don't know how persistent it's going to be. I don't know how much the seed cost. I don't really know much about it.

37:00 But you know, we're always trying to try new things. To me, this looks like it did well enough that we'll continue to investigate it. And actually, the guys from Italy are supposed to be coming. They're coming through and they want to stop in and look at this, you know, later on this year. So stay tuned on that. But that's something that, you know, could be a good, you know, nutritious grazing legume as well.