All right. Good morning everyone.
I'm Jenny Rees, Nebraska Extension Educator.
It's great to be back here
and see so many people at this conference.
And it's great also to see all the networking
because I actually met Jay at this conference.
Oh no, it's 2017 or 2018,
but it's a great way to network and meet other people.
So with me on this panel today are Jay Goertzen,
a farmer from York County.
He's been interseeding cover crops for four years.
And Chad Dane,
a farmer in Clay County who's been interseeding cover crops
for three years.
And I'm just so blessed to get to work with so many farmers
who let me walk alongside of them,
learn with them about the questions that they have
in their own fields.
So when we're talking about interseeding, why do,
why are people interested in interseeding?
Well, primarily interseeding of cover crops
what we're talking about is interseeding
in early season corn and soybeans.
So V3 to V4 corn.
For soybeans, we tested at emergence on soybeans and at V2.
So ultimately we would recommend in soybean, at planting,
at emergence or a dormant seeding when it comes to soybeans.
But why are we doing this?
Because we know that that window after corn and soybean
harvest is so short.
So for those who are looking to get more diversity
in the system, it's harder to have anything
beyond cereal rye.
And so I'm so grateful that we had a great group of growers
that looked at this.
Their goals can differ depending
on their specific operations.
It may be to increase nitrogen,
allow for weed control,
reduce their nutrient inputs in their system,
increase diversity,
allow for more cover crop growth for forages.
So, and then I'm gonna put at the bottom, this was my dream.
I can't say this is everybody's dream, but it was my dream.
My dream was to have something always growing
in between the corner of the soybean rows.
And it looks very different.
It's a very different way of thinking to go down this road,
but as I talk with farmers
and as we look at the challenges we're facing,
possible greater regulations,
the difficulty finding chemicals,
I think more farmers are interested in finding ways
to reduce inputs in their system.
So this is a way we were trying to do that.
You heard Jay speak, I think 2019 or 2020 at this conference
about his work with interseeding that first year.
I am thankful to Kacha and the committee for inviting us
back to share what happened three to years later.
But this ended up being a partnership 2020 through 2022,
between The Nature Conservancy,
the Upper Big Blue ND, Extension, Kellogg's,
and then all of our Farmer Cooperators.
We had 11 farmer cooperators throughout
the duration of the three years.
Six of them chose to do this via on-farm research where they
maintained the same strips of cover crops and check in their
fields throughout the duration of the three years.
And I have lots of pictures of people because we did a lot
of data collection.
I'm so grateful to all my colleagues at the university,
both current and former colleagues who helped,
to Dr. Mary Drewnowski, Dr. Darren Redfern
for the use of their grad students who helped
us so much, and then all of our partners who helped.
So with that,
I'm going to turn it over to our panelists
to share their experiences.
So we're gonna start with Jay Goertzen.
Okay, so good morning.
Yeah, Jay Goertzen.
I'll just start out a little bit with telling you guys
where I'm at.
I'm in Henderson, Nebraska.
We are fully irrigated 2/3 corn, 1/3 soybeans
kind of a rotation.
I'm wide row, ridge-till silt loam soils.
And there's kind of average yields for the area,
like field wide on a decent year.
So I think Jenny touched on some of these goals.
The biggest goal that I had was learning about soil health.
Everything I read, everything I listened to,
everybody kept coming back,
coming back to this idea of diversity.
And as you can see,
I'm drawing a fair amount of acres that are corn on corn
with that 2/3, 1/3.
So the acres I'm putting these interseeded crops on,
some of them are 20 to 30 plus years of corn.
And it's that way because I rent, I don't have,
there's some logistics stuff that goes on in there,
but I was just trying to figure out how can I get something
else in here with the corn so that I can keep growing corn,
keep doing what we've been doing, keep everybody happy,
but also maybe start making an influence
on the microbial biomass as well.
So this is, I started up there at the,
on the top left was my first trial.
The first year I did it,
I went and stole row units off of a drill that I owned with
my cousin and then a neighbor had a gandy box sitting around
and I had a cultivator bar.
So I spent a couple days slopping that together and it
worked and it worked really good and I was super excited.
I actually had like a two bushel yield increase,
which according to UNL doesn't matter,
but it mattered to me.
I thought that was pretty cool.
It didn't go down.
So, and no offense.
Statistically, so anyway,
I don't understand all the statistics part,
but I thought that was cool.
So the next winter I spent all winter building
the picture there that the little bigger picture of a 12 row
to match my equipment, my size, everything.
And because I was believed it would work.
And then the bottom picture there is a old stock chopper
where I moved the row units over to actually go
in between the row,
and I think that's where the future of this is for me,
is using this interseeder to even plant rye
or something ahead of soybeans so that I can go in there
and rather than using herbicide,
I can go out there and terminate my rye by rolling it
and then reduce my herbicide even further.
I've done it once semi successfully and it was,
the results were pretty exciting.
So one of the main things that I looked at too was I was
coming at the point where I thought this might be something
that would increase value for the grazer.
I don't personally have cattle,
but I thought well maybe I can entice people to pay me a
little extra for my corn stalks
if I can raise something for them.
And I have another neighbor who does have cattle
and he does a population study every year
and he wanted me to interseed it.
So we interseeded it.
And just to kind of show you the difference
of what sunlight does,
the left one there is 10,000 population and you can see he
has milo in the mix and it looks like Milo.
And you go down to 15,000
and it's kind of hard to see in the picture,
but it looked kind of like a funny looking grass.
And then you get down to 20,000,
you can't really even tell that it's Milo anymore.
Just that if you want to get biomass,
you're gonna give up corn population.
This is on my own acres,
just comparing a dry land corner where I reduce rates 24,000
versus under the pivot where it's 30,000.
And just to see the difference in how much growth there is
and how that is a direct relation to your population.
This is what happens, this is what happened
on the second year after I got all excited,
after that first year,
I went out and seeded 300 acres and one of the quarters
happened to have a number that had really good ear flex
and really good yield potential.
So I had dropped the population down,
was pretty excited about planting into that.
But it also did not have a very good green snap rating.
We had a windstorm and I had about 40% green snap.
That field turned into a jungle, that opened up the canopy.
The cover crops took off.
You could not walk through the field.
I mean it was literally, it was, it was a mess.
Still yielded 165 but it wasn't much fun.
On the right side there is that same year
on a field where it didn't green snap,
the stuff stood up pretty well.
But just to show you how much growth we had,
we had cowpeas going all the way to the top.
They were in some fields,
they were trellising across the 36 inch rows and you're
walking like through head high soybeans, you know,
it was just hard to walk through the field,
but it didn't hurt yield that bad where I didn't have
the green snap issue.
This was just kind of showing what it looks like in the fall
and the spring.
There was not as much that survived as I was hoping.
I was hoping I could use this as a way to take place of my
planting cereal rye after corn or after soybeans, you know,
late in the season, that I could get a really good
established crop early.
But it seemed like by harvest time most
of that stuff had died off.
And then when you ran shredding corn head
over the top of it,
you took care of a lot of the rest of it.
And there was a little bit of green
you can see out there in October.
The most exciting one was in the springtime.
One of my mixes had some cereal clover, or I'm sorry,
I had six pounds of cereal rye
and one pound of sweet clover.
And most of what you see out there
is actually the sweet clover.
It's not the cereal rye and there's a closeup picture of
what those roots are doing.
There's a lot of nodulation going on
and that was just one pound.
So that was exciting to see.
I do know that some of the other people in the group had a
hard time killing that stuff.
Sweet clover is pretty hard to kill.
I did not have an issue.
It was going into a bean field and I used dicamba and it,
it did die for me,
but I know some guys hit it two or three times and still
couldn't get it to die.
One of the other years I played with herbicide options,
I'm set up to band on my planter being a ridge-till guy.
So I did some playing with banding of Generic Lexar.
I also did, so if I would band,
I would band with the planter and then I would spray Roundup
or Liberty one to two days before I planted my interseeding
and that's all I had to clean it up.
And then, so the middle of the row really never got
a pre-emerged that whole season.
And then in, let's see,
the second year I did two quarts of generic Lexar at
planting and I broadcast it and then about four weeks later
is when I came in and interseeded, that worked as well too.
You could however see that it reduced the population of my,
what came up in that interseeded in those strips because of
that probably 'cause of the Callisto and the metalochlor
that's in there.
And then this last year I did a broadcast of verdict,
which is a mixture of Outlook and Sharpen.
I did that right before the corn was coming up and then
I interseeded about three weeks later and there was no other
spray on that field.
So that was actually a really cheap herbicide plan
for that last year.
In fact, when I was going back through
and splitting up expenses with my landlords,
I couldn't figure out where my second spray had gone on that
field and I remembered what had happened.
So it actually, it worked pretty good and it,
it is working at actually reducing herbicide costs
if you plan accordingly.
Oh this is a picture that goes back
with the herbicide stuff.
So all the way on the left, that's where I had used,
I think it was the two quarts of Lexar.
So you can see that there's not as much diversity in there
as if you look way over on the right
where there was nothing.
On the right there you can see some radish and stuff like
that up front, small seated that stuff was knocked
out by the herbicide.
And on the left here you're basically seeing some grass,
some cowpeas and there's some flax in there.
So just to kind of show as you move that way there was less
herbicide in the mix.
So it did,
but what was interesting though was that even with that
pretty high rate of herbicide stuff did come up and it came
up through it and I think that just running that drill unit
through there was enough disturbance to break that,
that the barrier or whatever that that herb pre-emerge is
putting down that it still allows stuff to come through.
So we were excited about that.
It does not mean you have to give up herbicides
in order to try this.
You just have to be a little more creative.
So my mix currently,
the one I used last year and we'll probably use something
like it this year,
this is what it is if you guys wanna see it.
Last year it was about 15 and a half dollars.
But that's what I'm using. I'm using five plants.
I may add annual right grass into there too.
At this point I'm not really sure.
But so that's kind of what I'm, what I'm doing.
I'm doing low rates.
I know if a guy were to go be grazing or if you wanted to
get more to make it over the wintertime you would have to
bump your rates.
But logistically 'cause of the cedar I'm using,
because of the timing this is going in
and because of the fact that this is
kind of could potentially compete with my cash crop,
I wanna keep my rates low in case we have a windstorm
or something like that.
There's just not quite as much competition out there.
Okay, so kinda to sum it up,
I did pros and cons basically, positive and challenges.
This adds a lot of diversity and that was one of my main
goals was getting stuff out there,
getting other roots out there.
And the first year I did this I just,
I didn't know what would grow in the shade of a corn row.
I was really, really surprised.
I think I tried probably 15 different species that first
year and then had a really hard time figuring out what they
were when they came up.
But they almost all came up and that was the cool thing,
how much diversity there really was.
The interseeder tool opens a lot of options for me.
It opened the option for relay cropping if some of you guys
have heard about that.
Putting rye then soybeans and then harvesting the rye over
the top of the soybeans and letting the soybeans come up.
It's just a kind of a spin on the double crop idea,
but it allows you to get better crop of your soybeans.
There's just things you can do because of your,
'cause you're planting, where you're placing your seeds,
it kind of opens some different ideas up there.
Perennial cover crops,
I think that's the next route that I will be exploring,
seeing if we can get some clovers or something like that to
grow all year round so I don't have to go out there and try
to terminate something in the spring if it over winters.
The diversity, I'm hoping it can eliminate my need
for insecticide and fungicide.
I, as a practice,
I don't use either one of them but I will if I need to.
But what we saw this these last four years was how much more
insect activity there was in these fields.
And we saw spots where when the root worm beetles come in,
start clipping your silks to the row
where there was cover crops,
they were eating the cover crop instead
of clipping corn silks.
Now I can't say that they would do this, you know,
overall, but, but that's what we saw.
And Jenny was in, you know,
six different cooperators fields.
She saw the same thing everywhere that the bugs would,
they were eating or the grasshopper we saw,
with the grasshoppers too.
There'd be cover crop species that were stripped all the way
clean and then you go over into the corn where there was no
cover crop and then they were chewing on the corn.
So it adds something else out there,
a different food source for them.
It also brought in beneficial stuff like that.
Some of that stuff was hard to measure
and actually put data to,
but it was stuff that we observed and we saw it in person.
I think it's a positive for grazing.
I don't think there's a huge, a huge benefit to it
but the neighbor of mine who has cattle said just even just
a little bit of green out there with that cornstalks really
makes them use the cornstalks a lot more efficiently.
And so he thought that even with that small amount of growth
we got that it was still a very positive thing
to have out there.
So it's something that, it was exciting that way too.
I had watermark sensors for three years in my interseeded
strip versus a no treatment strip and every year it
showed that the stuff that had covered crop in it
used less water, three years in a row.
This is, I mean it's under a pivot,
but I was monitoring that and it data showed it and the last
thing was an increased organic matter and that's,
I'll put with a little caveat,
there were a few other practices I was doing and the organic
matter increased across all treatments
including the check strip.
So it's a little bit,
not quite sure why that happened but it was almost a whole
point in three years and I went out and double checked it
'cause I didn't believe it.
And the second test I did also showed it as well.
So there's potential for something to happen.
The challenges, controlling weeds can be a challenge
because you do have to think through your herbicides
when you're using a diverse mix like I was,
that pretty much takes every single herbicide off the table
unless you can place that herbicide far enough in advance,
you know that or you just have to be creative.
You gotta really think it through and realize that you,
it's a balancing act.
The weeds that we did have, when we had a good establishment
of cover crops, they didn't compete.
They were there but they didn't get big and you go on the
check strip, you know they got, you know, the water hemp,
whatever, you know we get this big,
you go on the interseeded stuff,
it stayed as big as the interseeded stuff,
it just never got big.
So yeah, the herbicide choices and timing is complicated.
Those spring pictures you guys could see,
it looks like a mess.
It's not real pretty to look at sometimes to me,
I like it but you know, some people if you're,
if you're renting ground like me,
you may have to talk to your landlords a little bit and try
to explain what you're doing, why you're doing it.
Wind and hail can get pretty interesting.
So make sure that you know what you're planting and that
it's a good standing variety so that you're not putting
something with potential green snap in with something that
could take off and be become a weed.
Does take a little bit
of creativity to pencil it out financially at this point it,
it's pretty hard to make that all make sense if you're just
looking at a book standpoint.
But when you start factoring in the insect stuff,
the possible beneficials,
the possible soil health metrics that maybe we can't measure
or we don't know how to make that thing tell us that we can
use less fertilizer.
You know some of those things are kind of hard to figure out
exactly that way.
There was not as much biomass that was presented that over
wintered as what I had hoped for and there was not probably
as much grazing value as I had anticipated.
I think that's the end of mine. I'll let Chad take over.
Good morning.
I realize I hadn't been up here for 28 years.
I started doing the math.
I worked a summer up here across the road for UNL
as a senior in, that was 1995.
So that tells you how old I am already.
But my name's Chad Dane, have a farm in Clay County.
We farmed just shy of 4,000 acres.
Corn, soybeans.
We have about a thousand acres of seed corn takes
a lot of our time.
My wife and I have seven children,
so if we're not in the field, we are in a gymnasium,
which is where I'm headed after this.
So I don't speak a lot.
Jay's gonna be a lot longer than I was or will be.
Let's see, where to start.
So I guess we've been growing cover crops for 12 years.
Kind of started when we were doing seed corn and cover crops
and seed corn's pretty easy,
lots of sunlight and we've had a green snap or hail event
11 years in a row now on our seed corn, amazingly enough.
So we have lots of sunlight.
That's the easy part.
We tried growing cover crops in field corn numerous times.
It's not that you can't get established,
you can fly seed on it will establish the problem is
sunlight and these, the cover crops get tall and spindly.
They fall over in the first event of hot weather,
say in September when you're done irrigating, they die off.
So you've spent a lot of money to no avail.
We've even done it with a 40% green snap in field corn flown
turnips and radishes on.
They did not develop correctly.
So when Jenny called and said, "Hey,
would you be interested in this?"
Well sure.
Anytime we could establish something early so that
plant develops correctly,
let it go dormant and then see if it comes on the fall.
Like you bet, that that sounds great.
So I've only done it for three years and my,
I guess my goal was to, I don't have cattle.
Cash rent's in my area pretty high. It's pretty intense.
So it's all about economics.
I guess my goal was to reduce nitrogen cost if we could,
hopefully to see an organic matter increase
and of course soil erosion.
I will say before I go into this mix,
one thing we have found in our area,
Clay County is named that for a reason.
We do have some heavy,
heavy clay and even drilling rye after corn harvest.
If you can let that get eight to 10 inches tall the next
spring and kill it off,
which and may maybe not even plant green.
We have found with all of our water sensors that we are
getting a deeper penetration with all our irrigation
and rain, just, just that little bit.
We've had some farms that were gravity irrigated for far too
long that we took over and water was only soaking 18 inches
deep first two years and after some rye,
we now our water goes down four feet when we irrigate
and our roots go down four feet.
We were seeing on our sensors,
the root mass wasn't even there past 24 inches.
So certain benefits,
but I'm getting off subject there Jenny.
So mine, I'm gonna,
I'm gonna tell you I don't even know what my mix was.
I said Jenny, I want a nitrogen building mix.
And so she, she helped me with all the work.
So you can see everything there.
There's our 21 mix and our 22 and yeah, the 21 mix.
You look at the cost at $46 an acre.
That's that's really,
yeah, after the first year I said, listen, we can't,
not too many farmers are gonna pay that kind of money.
That's a big outlay to, you know, especially,
oh let's say if we could make 50 pounds of nitrogen even at
a dollar a pound, which, you know, you're,
you're at break even there.
So 2022 that got reduced to $22 an acre.
And so that's more reasonable for our goals.
Herbicide.
So yeah, this is a timing thing.
So to get cover crops seeded in corn,
we use the NRDS drill.
I didn't build one like Jay.
What, two leaf.
You can start going to probably planting it. Two leaf corn.
Five leaf corn, you're almost too late.
By six leaf corn if you're interseeding we've seen that,
that the corn's too big already.
You will not get established.
So you've got about an eight to 10 day window in there to
get this done, which is doable if you get the weather.
Our pre emerges were some atrazine and metalochlor, Roundup.
Our post was Roundup and Liberty I think all three years
we just posted it either the day they planted or a couple
days after before the cover crop came up or the day before.
We did 1.75 quartz of Lexar and 1.8 quartz of Lexar.
So yeah, even with the Callisto in there you can,
you can get a good establishment of cover crop which was,
which was nice to see.
And honestly our weed control was fine
in both the seated and unseated.
And so these strips,
we did 'em three years in a row and the very same strips.
And so our goal was to,
and I'm gonna let Jenny talk about what we saw on the soil
tests after three years, but early season and mid-season.
Yeah, I don't, we got good establishment.
Mid-season, you can see that we had great covers.
Some of the cowpeas and the,
they call forge beans is that the other bean and the
buckwheat had gotten up pretty tall and I thought,
boy this is gonna be bad on a corn head, you know,
we're not gonna get through this.
But by harvest time you didn't even notice it.
They were there,
they had dried up just like the corn plant,
corn head went through no problem.
Yeah, excellent weed control, good cover.
Here's the fall and really the guys with a cow herd
I think could take advantage of something like this.
You know, there is, there's some growth there.
This is October, I don't know when that picture was taken,
but that's mid-October
and you can see we've got some good cover there and it grew
for another two weeks before it froze.
And so we were really happy with the results.
Now in year three this year we had, let's see, Pioneer 1563.
That's a very tall bushy plant.
And the early season looked just like that.
By late season, by what? When did we go there?
Mid-August, late August, September, first September.
There was hardly anything in my plot.
I hadn't been in there for two weeks. I couldn't believe it.
A lot of it died off. It was, that's just too big a plant.
Okay, so there is a little bit to picking
the right corn hybrid too, I believe.
We did do one year a soybean mix and did some winter wheat
and clover and the soybeans were planted into green
cereal rye that spring.
And then we killed that with Roundup, Valor and Zidua
and then we did no herbicide on the plot.
And so there's after we drilled the wheat and clover.
Came up nicely and as you would you expect irrigated
soybeans, they get chest high.
Zero sunlight gets in there, the wheat died off.
But the, I don't know if we have a picture
of the clover stayed living and it was nodulating
and we only did that one year.
So there is potential there.
I'm trying to think what else.
I guess for me, three years, were we successful?
Did we learn anything?
Yes, we're increasing the bugs in our soil
without a doubt.
The, you're increasing or helping soil erosion in a picture
like that on the right.
If you've got any kind of rolling fields,
you get a pouring rain without a doubt
you're decreasing soil loss, so that's a benefit.
It's, it's a challenge.
It's a timing challenge.
After three years we need to keep going.
We're probably going to plant soybeans
in this field this year and not do anything different.
See if, we'll go ahead and measure those strips again
and just see if after three years there was a benefit.
And then I think what I'd like to do, as Jay mentioned,
it's such a timing issue.
You know to cover a couple thousand acres of this
would be very difficult.
I think we need to get to more of a solid seated clover,
run a strip till machine through it,
maybe band herbicide and try to plant in that same spot for
five or six years and maintain that clover in between
the rows and cut our herbicide costs.
See if we can actually cut our nitrogen down
by 80 pounds or something.
Then we're talking some real benefits.
So yeah, that's about it for me.
So I'm gonna finish up with a summary
of what we learned in our six on farm research fields.
So we had six on farm research fields but we had
July 9th, 2020 and 2021 we had the windstorms
that impacted yields.
June 14th, 2022 was a massive hailstorm
in our area of the state.
So we only had two fields that made it to harvest last year.
We also had two soybean studies
where they were interseeded in 2021.
So instead of showing you a bunch of graphs,
'cause I could spend a lot of time on graphs,
I just wanna give you the overall summary and then share
where we're gonna go,
what we learned and where we're gonna go from here.
So we had a total of 12 corn site-years
and two soybean site-years.
We took cover crop biomass every year in September.
10 of the 12 site-years,
the interseeded cover crop had more biomass than the check.
There were two times where the check treatment that was in
2020, where the canopy had 40 to 45% green snap
opened it up.
We had more weeds in those check strips than we actually had
even cover crop in the interseeded area.
And that's just because we had no residual herbicide.
We used the same herbicide program across the entire area
of this plot.
When it came to yield, half of the site,
so six of the 12 years we had higher yield in the check
treatment than the interseeded.
In half the years we had no difference.
So those yields ranged from two bushels an acre to 10 bushel
an acre under that check.
When it came to the soybeans,
we had no difference in the yield where we interseeded.
So those two locations, no difference in yield.
Net return, 10 of the 12 site-years for corn.
We had a higher net return for the check.
And going back to Jay's point in that we're only looking,
we're basically looking at the cost of the cover crop
and the cost to intercede.
We're not taking into account any other benefits.
So half the guys grazed their fields.
We didn't take any account for any changes in soil health
benefits for less insecticides or fungicides.
So those are things that we need to think about as a soil,
like a community around soil health.
How do we attribute economics to these factors?
We hope to do that more in the future with our group.
Soil health values.
We took PLFA, so phospholipid fatty acid analysis,
that's your soil microbes.
So that looks at total microbial biomass as well as how much
is bacteria versus fungal.
And then we also did the Haney test.
So we did this in 2020 and then we did it again in 2022,
both the same time of the year, the same way of sampling.
And what we found was a significant increase from 2020
to 2022 of our, all the soil health indicators in the check
as well as it happened in the interseeded.
So when we look at overall when we compare
the check to the interseeded,
we can't say that the difference in that increase in the
microbial growth in the soil health indicators was due to
the interseeding itself.
So then I'm getting these results back,
scratching my head and I start asking them
all more questions.
These guys are already doing a lot of practices,
soil health practices that many of you in the room are
probably already doing.
So they were maintaining everything correctly
on their strips.
But like Chad,
he drills rye across his whole field every fall
and was grazing.
And Jay was doing that on several times
and he also was using compost extract in his field.
We had another guy applying a biological across this field
that I found out after the study.
So they're all doing additional things
to increase soil health.
So the good news for all these guys,
they all significantly improved their soil health
in three years.
It's just we can't attribute all of that
to the interseeding itself.
And then we also took the soil nutrient values and there
were individual changes but across the board
we didn't see any differences.
This is just a picture Jay,
this is actually from your field to show red ripper cowpeas.
When you open up that canopy,
what it does and Steve Melvin is my colleague with UNL
that's been working with me on these studies as well.
You can see how great of nitrogen fixers
those cowpeas are as well.
What I was excited about was,
what I feel that our group achieved is we were able to prove
that we can intercede cover crops into early season corn
and seed soybeans successfully.
So we were able to get establishment,
we were able to get growth,
they survived the growing season.
We had something at harvest and then we also had something
that survived the winter and how much survived the winter
depended on what the rate was and what the species were
and how the winter was.
If it was a dry, open winter,
you didn't have as much survival.
If you had snow cover, we had a lot more survival.
And so these are just examples.
We've got red clover, hairy vetch, yellow sweet clover.
This was really cool until it gets really scary.
Like you know when you start realizing, oh my goodness,
like we're throwing so much herbicide at this thing
and it's not dying.
I learned, I have a whole presentation just on herbicides.
So all this information will be in crop watch.
We'll have like four articles in crop watch,
'cause that's how much we've learned.
But the clover though is what really encouraged us,
how this survived really encouraged us
for where we're going.
I've got two slides on what we learned.
I'm not gonna go through all of this.
If you wanna take pictures you can do that,
but I put it on here so that you could just see the summary.
A lot of this was covered between the three of us already.
One thing that wasn't covered is we do need to think about
water early on in that season.
So if we've got a dry spring,
gotta think about maybe an inch of either rainfall or
irrigation and the irrigation we were splitting
it into half inch passes,
'cause you've really gotta have something to get
those seeds that are just at the surface or just below the
surface getting going early on in that season.
And then everything else,
so we also saw that with the Japanese beetles
regarding the insects.
So Jay mentioned the insects part of it.
This next slide, what we learned, buckwheat and flax,
it just became pollinator sanctuaries out there.
Just butterfly sanctuaries, lacewings dragonflies.
It was beautiful.
It's really, it looks different but it's just beautiful.
If I'm to recommend what you want in your interseeded mix,
I'm always gonna say, especially in corn, on corn,
buckwheat, cowpeas,
flax and then collards, like a forage collard
and then annual or Italian rye grass or both of them.
The reason buckwheat and cowpea,
they're gonna be your first things up.
They come up quick, three to five days,
they get a broad leaf and I really think
that helps us with weed control.
It shades the ground quick.
Forage collards provide your understory
or you can use other grass too.
We just started switching to forage collards and they also,
I felt helped with weed control.
I already talked about the yellow sweet clover
and this key I mentioned at the beginning,
but if you're gonna do this in soybeans,
the earlier the better.
So interseed at planting, at emergence
or do a dormant seeding.
Hybrid is important.
So both of these guys actually use Pioneer 1563
and they both learned and it's a great hybrid
and it's a great flex hybrid too.
But when you're using these really tall,
really broadleaf hybrids,
we gotta think about what else we're trying to achieve
within those rows.
So be thinking about your hybrids
when you're doing this as well.
And then I took a ton of soil samples and I wasn't smart
enough early on, but that's how we learn.
I couldn't ever figure out where all the nitrogen was,
where are all the nutrients?
Took all these soil samples and there was always less
nutrients where we interseeded versus
what the check treatments were.
Well the nutrients are all in the plants.
So if you're gonna be doing nutrient analysis in these cover
crop studies, take the nutrient analysis,
take biomass samples,
send them to places like Wards and have them do the nutrient
analysis for you.
So we started doing that the last two years because our guys
wanted to know how much nitrogen is this cover crop provided
me for the next season.
So that was an additional thing that we started using.
I wish I would've known that sooner.
So where are we going?
This, we got excited about clover and it's because
after interseeding into soybeans, which I was okay,
I was excited but I was kind of scared and we had to plan A
through E on what to do for herbicide options.
And the last one E, was we were gonna abandon
the whole thing.
But I'm so grateful that these growers are just willing
to just take that risk,
jump in and and take those risks with me.
But after we saw how the red clover got established in
soybeans, it was just really cool because we're like,
we already have that crop then established for the corn
that's going in there the next year.
So we're switching now our mindset a little bit
to perennial covers.
Last year we started with six fields
that were dormant seeded.
So when I'm saying dormant seeding,
this is in March using the interseeder.
So we dormant seeded in March, we did red clover,
some guys did Dutch white clover.
So think about the white clover in your lawns,
that's low growing, hard to kill, that's Dutch white clover.
That's what we're gonna start putting in fields.
Actually we're gonna go to AberLasting this year,
which which is a mix of Dutch white times Kura clover.
And the reason for that is it has a little bit more drought
tolerance, really good grazing.
So this is one of the fields that survived.
This is in corn.
We love the way that this looked,
this is Mammoth Red Clover.
Got two feet tall,
two feet tall and then just laid down.
An amazing weed control.
We compared the economics of this compared to a full
herbicide treatment in his check strips.
And basically this all's it has is Lepidium to kill the rye.
Two rounds of Zidua.
So when you're thinking about working with cover crops,
you really have to start thinking outside
the box with herbicides.
And we're just using a lot of group fifteens after the herb,
after the covers are emerged.
So we're excited about this.
This is what it looked like after running a strip till rig
in it this fall.
And so we're excited to see what it looks
like next year with soybeans.
This was soybeans.
It looks like a mess, again,
it's a different way of thinking.
It looks very different.
This looks kind of scary when you get clover that's that
tall growing with your soybeans.
This is what it looked like at harvest and after harvest.
And then that's what it looks like today.
So we're just excited to look at the economics of the system
and see, okay, now we've got the clover established,
how well does it come back?
And over time what are the economics of okay,
if we're not receding, we've got that cost gone.
Can we reduce our herbicide?
Can we reduce our nitrogen in the system?
And I think that's of interest to us.
That's where we're,
I'm not saying that we're not gonna interseed annuals too,
but this is what several of the guys are excited about.
Gonna give a plug for our on-farm research meetings.
If you wanna hear more about these and other studies,
these are the different locations and we're asking that you
would RSVP and with that I'm gonna just turn it over,
open it up for questions that you have for us.
Okay, the question is,
what's the current status with crop insurance with
interseeding cover crops?
So when I, when I look at the RCIS policies,
technically it is legal to do this,
but then you read further and it talks about,
it's based on what your local NRCS region dictates,
especially when it comes to planting green and termination,
things like that.
So according to RCIS when you read it, the big policy,
it's you can do it but, but then you got also,
I mean there's the NRCS part of it and at the end
of the day I'll let these guys talk about what they,
what they see on it.
I will say we did a lot of interseeding in other situations,
including after a hailstorm
when a guy was down to 10,000 plants.
And what we did is we interseeded a cover crop mix in a
portion of his field and then he left a check strip
because his cover,
his crop insurance guy wasn't sure about the whole thing.
To the row where we had interseeded the cover crops,
palmer didn't come in,
Palmer came in crazy where the hail damage was without so
and so, I mean that is something to also consider
in these situations.
Yeah I did, I did talk to my insurance guys
before I did it.
I thought about not talking to him but then,
then I wondered what would happen.
But yeah, like she said,
I mean according to the big main policy,
I don't remember the wording but I did look it up
specifically and I think there were some conversations with
here, but look at the policy,
this is what it says and it's worded that it is inclusive.
The way I understood it.
Yeah, I asked my guy and he just said,
go ahead, it's legal.
I think that's changed recently and seed courted companies
are now paying us extra to plant cover crops as part of
their contract so I think in the future these things
will be more normal.
I have a couple questions.
Have you done any research with broad soybeans and also are
you using any digital chemicals to, for weed control?
I guess I didn't catch what,
I didn't do any soybean stuff myself.
But as far as the residuals,
I mean we definitely did use residuals, we used them.
What I did was finding that, you know,
if you could wait three weeks or something after that
residual, you had the better stand.
But we also, this last year,
some of the guys who got the perennials going were using
residual like, like metalochlor or Zidua
on top of the emerged clover.
So to give you that residual.
But after that cover crop has already come up.
But to keep the other stuff from coming.
And I didn't catch the first part
of your question.
What kind of soybeans?
Oh, drilled soybeans.
Okay, so, so on the soybean study Chad had 30 inch rows.
No I'm talking like 15 to seven and a half.
Right, right.
So Chad had 30 inch rows but the other guy who did the
soybeans was in 15 inch rows and so on that one
he farms tough ground.
That field is some tough ground and I was concerned about,
he had a beautiful stand of 15 inch soybeans and we were
gonna interseed through there and I knew we were gonna kill
soybeans along the way.
So we actually added a half rate of soybeans into our wheat
and our clover mix just to make sure
that we could have enough cover.
'Cause it's, I mean that was,
had a lot of train on that ground it turned out amazing.
Kudos to you Jenny and Chad and Jay
for sharing and it's truly innovative work
that you're doing with interseeding and sharing
the replicated results.
Kudos to you guys today.
Has there in central Nebraska been any new farmer
to farmer learning communities?
Because it, it takes,
you gotta up your game management wise and your herbicide
talk and their experiences.
They're willing to share farmer to farmer here as is there
any new groups that have started in your area that are
willing to share results with cover crops?
Because really in Nebraska we only have maybe what four
or 5% cover crops, totally, you know,
across the state and that might be generous at that.
But I see this as a new opportunity for farmers to learn
amongst themselves, those that are leaders in their area.
There is a kind of a small group of people
that have, we've been meeting
and not like taking data necessarily,
but just sharing experiences and I think that started
because there were probably 10 or 12 of us that were all
bugging Jenny about,
well who are the other people that are trying this stuff?
And so she kind of connected some dots
and put some names together.
And so there's a few of you in this room and and a few
others that you know within probably a 50 mile radius
of York or so that that are meeting.
And that's, I would encourage anybody, you know,
wherever part of the state that you are,
if you find a few other people who are trying some different
things or whatever just to talk to other people because then
you're not alone doing it and also helps you when you make
mistakes or you can learn from somebody else's mistakes or
share your own or whatever.
And it's not the same,
you don't get the same judgment that you would
at the coffee shop.
I guess I'll just add to that,
that I guess the biggest challenge for me is herbicides
and trusting that you can back off.
I've got a father who sees one sunflower in the ditch
and he's making a phone call to me, you know,
get your corn knife out and my grandfather was even worse.
So this is a whole different, you know,
you gotta have a landlord willing to see these things
and hey this is something different.
So for me,
backing off herbicides is what I wanna learn and trusting
that in the future.
So what was the big concern in the,
in the greens snap corn?
Because you, in my mind you're either gonna
have a cover crop kind of explode and take over
that's gonna freeze out and not really
be a, in my thought, maybe not a major problem.
But if you don't, at least in my area and it was mentioned,
Palmer will go fricking nuts and it'll be a problem at
harvest time even after they're dead where the other ones
are probably gonna melt for the most part.
And that's a good point and that I hadn't,
that year that that happened.
I mean that was the first time I'd had that bad of hail in
quite a or wind I guess in quite a while.
And the other experiences had been like, you know,
replanting hail so the, you know,
there you don't have that comparison but that is a good
point on the Palmer thing that the fact that that stuff took
off, it did, it did keep the weeds at bay.
It's just that those became weeds and I,
I did question that year how much of my yield loss was
because of hail and how much or the,
I'm sorry I keep saying hail,
wind, 'cause that's what I had this year.
Yeah it was hail was the wind was,
how much of it was due to the covers actually stealing
nitrogen because I think at that point when they started
getting that big, they were competing with the corn,
they were competing and where I had check strips,
the yield difference was definitely bigger that year between
my check strips and my cover crop because of that.
I think that just that competition that was there,
but it did keep the weeds out.
You were correct.
How much opportunity is there
to increase your grazing fees
and they offset some of the costs?
I come from a, I do not have cattle,
didn't grow up with cattle and the guys that I deal with
that have cattle either have their own ground or they don't
want to pay any extra.
So I think it's hard to,
it's hard to convey that benefit,
especially because I'm not doing it myself saying yeah I've
done the, the one neighbor that I did some interseeding for,
he did some strip trials and he found that,
whether it was from the interseeding
or just the fact that he was strip grazing,
he tripled his, his time cow per acre, however you,
whatever the terminology is there,
I mean he tripled it pretty easily.
But that was also mo you know,
cutting him back and reducing,
moving fence and doing all that kind of work.
And most of the guys that I know who run cattle,
they want to fence off a quarter
and they don't want to touch it.
And even one of the guys that I've talked to,
I said well I'll move the fence for you.
And he was pretty nervous even about that,
like 'cause I wanted to see what it would do,
but he didn't even wanna let me do the work just because he
was worried about the cows.
I can't say I have a lot of experience
with that in field corn,
but in, in seed corn, yeah guys will, excuse me,
bring 400 cows and drop 'em off
and come back in a month, you know,
and yeah we've gotten paid up to $30 an acre for some of
that and their, their pairs, the calves do gain pretty good.
They've been happy I think,
but one year then I didn't get paid, you know,
so it's kinda like the hay business and so I think you gotta
trust who you're working with and there are some
opportunities but as far as the, these covers, you know,
these were small 15 acre plots,
they weren't big enough to justify that yet.
Thank you so much. I think we are out of time.
We have another speaker coming up.
Thank you to the panel for bringing all of this together,
talking about soil health
and all these beneficials, this is very cool.