 This webinar is actually really timely for cover crops from Marisol Berti and if you haven't listened to Marisol talk about cover crops before she is a wealth of information and my go-to person for pretty much anything research related or practical applications equipment I mean all that kind of stuff there you just have a lot of experience Marisol so thank you for sharing that with us and what we'll do is we'll just play a pre-recorded webinar and then Marisol and I will be over in the chat box and we can answer questions as you have them as we go through the presentation. This is a series of webinars that's been sponsored by the North Central Sustainable Agriculture and Research and Education and so we're putting some some of these webinars that they used to be live presentations in this format and so I'll go through the presentation and this link will be available for you and then you can send questions later okay so I am Marisol Berti and a professor in the Department of Plant Sciences and main campus in Fargo, North Dakota State University and I work in cover crops, forage crops and crop systems so this presentation is a compilation of some information from the research on how to select a cover crop according to the crop system so to your crop system so the first thing you need to do if you're gonna do cover crops and you know if you're really doing some is to learn some more about cover crops right to know what their family belong to what resistant they have are they winter hard they are not are they warmer cool seasons or what function do they perform in the ecosystem become familiar and learn these webinars is a way to learn some of the things because to make the decision of what to plant on your cropping system you need to understand certain things about these cover crops so classification we can classify my family botanical family legumes cereals brassicas and other families by the season or cycle cool season or warm seasons that's very important and by ecosystem function these are the functions that these if different cover crops and different families do and it's gonna be related to the objectives of why or what you want the cover crops for and I'll show that later so the cover crops most important families are the grasses in which you know most of the crop right the cereals right winter wheat barley oats triticale for sorghum also millet brassicas radish turnips canola and legumes okay and so we have much more legumes and these ones but crimson clover winter pea there's fabadine there's many others now root system is something very important because root systems do different things in the soil we're interested on soil health and so each types of family have different things that contribute to the soil so the root system we have a fibrous system which is typical of the of the cereals right here you can see you can see a right a right root and it has a lot of the soil attached to it while if you look at a radish or turnip on the on the right side left side you can see that there's no soil attached and this is because cereals they have they have association with mycorrhizal fungi which produce some glue like substances that make the soil to glue to that root and also improve soil aggregation the root on the top is from an alfalfa root and you can see those are fat those are roots they have no oils no oils that in symbiotic association with the plant fix atmospheric nitrogen so they put nitrogen into the soil so it's important to see that and you can see the roots of the brassicas turnips and radish don't have soil attached and it's because plants and these family are not mycorrhizal cesium cycle is very important because it's going to depend when you can plant or cannot plant these crops depending your objective worm seasons we have forage sorghum, millet, teff, cowpea of course corn so even those are worm seasons and worm seasons are crops that require temperatures so they cannot be plant too early in the season and they are freeze as soon as the temperature reaches 32 Fahrenheit on the fall cool seasons you know them cereals there's a lot of legumes and brassicas all the ones we use they're all cool seasons I don't know if any worm season on brassica important to know them to see where you're going to feed them and you're on your cropping system so your cropping system and the questions on this cropping system is very important right what is your crop rotation if you ask someone well what crop should I use we need to know what crop you have before the cover crops and what crop is following your cover crops the reason for this and why is this important is because residual herbicides right we need to know what crop you have before you're going to plant cover crops and know where's your herbicide program because if you have a residual herbicide likely you might kill all your cover crops so you need to know that and I'm not going to talk much about that but Dr. Mike Gosley and the Carrington Research Extension Center he did a webinar last week and it's available online at that link and this will be available for you to see and he did a presentation on herbicide residues and cover crops what cover crops you can plant or not on herbicides used in corn or soybean then the other thing is important to know what cover crop you cover crops or crop you have before and after is the seeding date right because if you have a cereal before your cover crop you have a lot more time to drill one but if you have corn you don't have that competition for water is important because some cover crops can drain the soil from water and some certain toxicity some crops can produce through allelopathic to each other seeding dates is extremely important the time you plant and I want to show this is some data every year we do this experiment just to show in the farmers the ability of the plants to grow planted with only two weeks difference we see these six these were planted on July 27 and August 10 okay I'm just showing that you like 27 the blue lines for plants on the grasses plants on the brassicas and plants and the legumes okay so I don't think I have an arrow all right so what the important thing is this graph that I have here is you see I have I have the different families grasses brassicas legumes but within one of these ones we have worm seasons right and cool season like forest sorghum foxy mill is a worm and these ones are cool season so if now I go ahead and I put the second date you can see this is the biomass produced from planting right until the frost came on these crops and you can see as forest sorghum on only that difference between planting you know it's about it's not even 15 days the biomass production of the crop reduced on 77% okay so that's the impact of the seeding date and the late summer and early fall and this is why it's important if you're planting a cover crop for fold raising you really don't want sorghum or millet because you're gonna produce very little and I show you some pictures and brassicas even though they're cool seasons you also lose growth because for every day that you lose in August you get less temperatures you still lose the opportunity to grow even these plants are not going to get frost away like sorghum they still gonna produce a lot less the later you plant them but these are plants that you can plant in the fall but you have to know that the sooner you plant right after the harvest of your cereal crop the more yield you're gonna have now you look here the winter cereals you can see that rye for example had actually higher yield on the second date okay because it's a cool season and the same with legumes you can see forage be still reduced but not as much as as a brassicas and the hairy veg actually increased in yield on the second day so this is key for selecting a cover crop or cover crop mix especially when you're in the fall this is for fall seeding right after a cereal crop so here are some of the pictures from that graph right this is how much is sorghum grew when planted on the end of July this is how much is it grew right this is a weed this is the important one you see there's almost nothing there's no cover doesn't even help with soil erosion here let let alone for grazing or anything you're not getting any biomass by planting in August 10 you know it's not so this is a picture show that in Foxel Mill is same thing you see planted at the end of July versus planted August 10 look there's almost nothing you know that dry stuff these pictures were taken after the frost so you can see this this frost is the grass that is there that's the grass well pictures taken all these pictures were taken at the same time for show you almost don't see a difference and so right you see some difference but it's mainly because there arise a winter crop and and when you plant it too early tends to try to vote even it doesn't try to shed so it gets a little taller while you plant the latest just just behaves as a winter you know it's just a winter crop so it's not going to produce tall biomass like oats but the differences as you saw in the graphic before and not as much but these differences are striking right you got 14 days of difference and you almost don't get any bios and the brassica as you saw the graph to their differences right between one planted in July one planted in August although these plants didn't freeze you see this picture was taken after first and you see sorghum and Miller frozen haven't frozen but these ones are still alive but we have a difference you can see a monster or the brassicas the one plant in July bolted and flower you know and flower and it has while this one looks it hasn't flower yet so there is a difference than that and there is a difference in root growth and that's what we're interested right we're trying to work on soil health brassicas are used for reducing compaction or you know moving nutrients that up from tapping nutrients from deep in the soil up up and you can see in this case that these you know when you planted a lot earlier you have a huge root so this root likely go is going deeper than this root planted two weeks later the same turnips and then with radishes you see here turnip here turnip here and then you have a radish here radish here you don't see as much different but in turnip you can see the huge difference so you have less about ground biomass by planting two weeks later but also you have less root mass which is what we're interested so objectives are very important everyone they ask me or ask any of the researchers or extension people is what cover crop should I use the first thing we're gonna ask you is where are your objectives what do you want the cover crop for okay with your spec from the cover crop what why do you want it for what why do you want to have cover crops and one what do you want that cover crop to do for your soil for your farm for your operation and your next crop so you have to have certain objectives in mind so we can help you and guide you we're not gonna give you a recipe or what it is we're gonna is just like in these presentations we're gonna tell you what are the alternatives that you can choose from so crop sequence is gonna be very important right and especially because of the timing that you're gonna have to plant or not plant so in North Dakota many parts we have a wheat or a cereal could be barley or oats followed by soybean the following year right and that's it's gonna be one of the common sequences and I'll show what what possibilities of crops you have there then we have one that's corn to soybean where things are a lot more complicated or soybean to soybean or soybean to corn right for people that grows corn soybean rotation how we insert these cover crops into those mixes then we have cereal sugar beet which is another rotation usually sugar beet in the red river valleys followed by after wheat and so we want to see what options we have there or in season and then we have full season grazing that means it's called full season grazing or cover crops are really there annual forages that's what they are and there's been a lot of use of these because of the preventive planted acres so you can put some of these forages and graze it later last year because of the conditions that were so wet the deadline to be able to graze these was moved to September 1st so a lot of farmers were able to graze it each year is on November 1st unless they change it so we'll see what happened this year they're gonna change it and for fall grazing usually of something planted after cereal is where you're gonna have different alternatives so I made these diagrams and a little bit to try to simplify the different sequences and what you're gonna do about them so from cereal to soybean or corn you kind of want to keep it especially from cereal to soybean you want to keep a simple and cheap right especially if you're not gonna graze it all your interest is soil health keep it as simple as and cheap as you can okay one this is not the only one but winter rise very important to have in the mix when you have soybean as an X crop because if it's too wet on the spring you need something to dry up the water so you can plant the soybean radish and flax are gonna get winter killed but they have another uses so if I have wheat I have time to drill really it's always better than high area sitting or broadcasting on the surface so if you have the time to drill you drill those red red shapes I have in there it's just to show that if you don't have this if you don't have these cove crops in the fall you're gonna have losses of nitrates and phosphorus by runoff while if you put those cover crops on top then this is going to disappear right whatever cover crab you have growing in August to November it's gonna avoid the losses of nitrogen and phosphorus in some erosion but in this spring is when we get when we are not wet and when in the spring we get a dry spell soils are not protected or covered by a cover crop growing cover crop they have a lot of ocean and then if it rains we have also nitrogen and phosphorus losses so we don't want that so in this case if we plant the winter rye winter rye will survive the winter and will provide a cover so these problems will disappear and I will be able to plant our soybean so some pictures here of a cereal and then soybean so this is winter rye that was planted last fall after a cereal or it could be after soybean if you have time and then this soybean was planted on to green rye okay rye you can terminate it before planting or you can plant when it's green and then terminate it will round up okay green planting takes a little more knowledge how to do it but it works especially on wet springs because rye helps to dry the soil so you can get the soybeans earlier in the season now you have to watch this that this system because if you're in a sandy soil you actually could get too much water out by the rye and cause a problem then we've seen that and dry years a crop like rye will dry the soil enough that it could cause a yield loss on your crop so you have to watch for that so soybean to soybean is the same thing some people are doing soybean to soybean like you you can see here this crop is still standing it was a aerial a seeded with rye you can see rye and they're in between the rows so it hasn't been harvested yet but that rye is going to provide a protection to the soil and to the nutrients not to be lost by erosion or by by leaching and once that soybean is harvested then you're gonna have that green cover okay so aerial seeding can be done right before leaf drop or somewhere in there but I'll show my more information about that so this crop is a winter rye is winter crop will survive until next spring and you can plant soybean again and there are some people doing that they're planting they put in an aerial seeded rye into standing soybean and next year they plant soybean again and here you can see the same thing so cereal to corn what is important is when you are doing cereal to corn that means you if you you cannot really use rye the same as you're going to wheat because some people use it still rye before corn but corn is very susceptible to rye for the different reasons it could be nitrogen tie up or it could be could be water problems it could be allelopathy or toxins so the recommendation the best recommendation if you have wheat this year next year you're going to corn or wheat again is don't have rye on your system and just have crops that winter kill like this is a barley flax rape so this was planted after a cereal crop and this is a radish flax turnip fava bean bio strips and it's a planting by strips so the farmer next year is going to plant the corn where this strip is okay so that's what's called by a strip it's gonna in that area where these radishes are concentrated and nutrients are picking up from deep in the soil now the farmer's gonna plant it there now the corn to soybean and it's a common sequence it's complicated because corn is too late and some years like last year we didn't even get it right there's still a lot of fields with corn and and so you can't really plant the cover crop after corn harvest because most years you're not going to have a season after corn harvest so here's where a lot of the work on inter seeding has been done inter seeding or seeding it can be a cereal rye if you're going to follow with soybean or if you're going to follow with wheat or corn again then you don't want cereal rye you just want barley or radish okay so inter seeding can be done at the v6 stage there's equipment develop I'll show pictures to do that and we've done a lot of work trying to figure out how to do this and what works and what doesn't and then the other possibility is aerial seeding or broadcasting within the r4 r6 I mean late in the season okay and September October we really don't have time because the corn still gonna be there so the idea of this inter seeding aerial seeding and standing corn is to establish a cover crop wild corn so when I take the corn off then this crop is already there okay if I don't put anything I'm gonna have losses of nitrate and phosphorus in the soil because I don't have any rain cover taking them up even I have corn residue I don't have a green cover roots green roots moving the nutrients so if I put radish in a cereal then I'm gonna get rid of that and then next spring I'm gonna have a leaving crop like rye if it's a winter crop and then I go to soybean so here's some pictures of what we did in our project and this is a larger it was a hundred acre field that it was inter seeded with a special equipment was developed for that which is this one and that one is a clean row separated six inches on the 30 inch center rows that I can plant plant those two rows of cover crops I'll show more pictures also you can use some of these hege sprayers modify for seeds and it works this this one works but the the disadvantage of this system is the seed is just placed in the soil there's no incorporation there's no really planting is it I would I would call it a inline or in row brocassin it's better than the area because the seeds don't get caught on the crop they go the regular soil but they're still on top of the surface and these systems are broadcasting or area have the disadvantage of that you cannot use cover crops with large seed you couldn't use you couldn't do peas you couldn't do fava beans and soybeans no nothing with a large seed can be done on these systems while we the this inter seeded this is a planter so you can put any size crop as you're planting here you see some different plants that we've tried we've tried different all different species to see what grows now they cannot be under the corn it has only like 15% of light and at some times of the year it's 10% of light so when you're putting these at v6 the plant is already about you know taking 70% of the light so it's only 30% left by the time these plants start coming out of the soil there's almost no light so you see they grow really kind of spindly for the lack of stuff light okay and then later in the season you see these here now the idea is that when you harvest these these plants are gonna get light and be able to grow but we will observe that is there is a huge difference on shade tolerance on these plants okay some plants can't tolerate these being a couple months without light but some don't do very good this is another planting within about 100 acres this is winter right with radish in the season this is what it was planted with that equipment I show before the twin rose seeder right you can see that the rye and the radish that they look spindly and and yellow and this one had Camelina too and you can see Camelina and this other one and then when this was the corn this corn was harvested this is where it look and we were really happy this was in 2016 you see there's rye there's radish you could graze these there's a lot of forest there together with the fiber of the corn and so we're happy to see these but this doesn't happen every year like last year this won't happen because the corn was never off so the cover crops even if they were there they never got a chance to grow okay and then in the winter this this is what you want to see because you could still graze cattle in the winter and get all that green stuff that isn't there right but we wish this is what we would want every year but this in corn doesn't happen every year there's so many years where corn graze really late like last year and we don't get to harvest it so cover crops and not gonna grow very well so even to certain it's a similar story except that you have a little more time that in corn usually comes off a couple weeks before you can do inter-sina v6 but I'll show you really all the work we've done when you intercede in soybean too early the older crops under the canopy die and the reason is in soybean even it's a lot shorter crop but it's a broadleaf so because it's a broadleaf there's no light going through the canopy so there's barely five percent of light under the canopy it's very dark in there we just don't go under the canopy so we don't know but there's no life for a crop to grow so what we're trying we really has work is more of a area of seeding a leaf drop or broadcasting where the the cover crop is not subjected to a really long period of shape of shape also all these interceding systems and you know rainfall we're rain fed system so the success that we get on doing this depends on on rainfall if we plant these here we get a nice rainfall all those cover crops are gonna come if you plan here and there's two weeks we know rainfall we're not gonna lose it or sometimes we get some rainfall but it's solid all the plant germinate and then they die so we're so dependent on rainfall because it's a broadcast that was the idea of doing this v6 right because we can put it on the soil but in soybean really doesn't work so the same concept if you are able to put something interceded ahead by the time you harvest the soybeans you're really gonna have a crop there and in soybean if you use an early maturing variety you might even be able to dry to drill the rye right after the soybean okay and if you do that then you can have a crop and so right can be planted later can be planted in September so if you have a winter rye you're gonna have a rye come back in the spring and take the moisture on nutrients a week to lose and also want to show you you can do these also we went to Camelina because it's also very winter hardy and here you see these been broadcasted over in soybean standing soybean is already there so when I have it is soybean I got a green cover right a green cover and then next year I'll plant soybeans and I'll show you some a different system that we have we call a relay cropping where we actually next year we plant the soybeans into the green Camelina before a bolt in the spring and then the soybean starts growing while the Camelina is still in there then Camelina is an oil seed of very high quality so you could get that crop and make some money if we have a market we don't really have a good market yet but it's a good possibility because then you get two crops once you have as a Camelina then the soybean keeps growing and here I want to show you there's a farmer in North Dakota that actually did this so and so he he has soybean last year he harvested the soybean and drilled this winter Camelina this is a 74 acre field he planted the Camelina and the fall with a twin row seeder and in the spring when Camelina was still very short he planted with a twin row planted again twin rows of soybean in between it's hard to see here the rows and this is a flowering time then when the Camelina dries and ready to harvest you can see there the row of soybean that's growing under right and I took this picture right before the farmer harvested and when the farmer harvested that then the Camelina is then harvested and then the soybean gets to grow and produce grain so you get that's why it's called relay cropping because you get two crops in the season okay you get become the now the farmer had a he adapted his he's a harvester so it had like a piece of tile drain the plastic where the soybean rows were to avoid cutting too much green foliage of the soybean like he was harvesting Camelina the yields the yields of the soybean were about 75% or would have been if you would have soybean alone so you will have a yield rack but then then you have Camelina too so if Camelina can have a good price then you have two crops okay moving on like I said we've done a lot of things with interceding our co-crops into soybean and R6 and here you see Camelina again we're doing some work on Camelina as reducing the soybean season at all and the green house we've seen that Camelina can reduce the soybean season at all but when we did this in the field it was very hard to get responsive because of the variability but this is what when you harvest and here we try different crops we try peas you see here the peas are super damaged by by the shade but when the variety was no soybean was harvested and you see these peas in the row here okay so it is possible to do it but you have to have an early maturing variety so it lets the co-crop to have light as soon as possible and like I said before this works better in R6 than V6 or R4 so this is what I was saying right if we have co-crops now for soybean to corn or wheat I mentioned the corn they may this is about the same I mentioned before you could have an interceding but we don't really recommend the V6 V8 we've seen in soybean doesn't work we can do an aerial seeding or we can do or we can but in this case we want to have crops that they winter kill like barley and radish or you can use winter Camelina winter Camelina does not have the problems that Rye has before wheat and corn you don't want to have Rye before wheat because of contamination if you get some plants to go to head you're gonna have your wheat contaminated with Rye seeds and in corn there's some allelopathy and wheat there is some too so you if you have Rye before wheat you may have a reduction in yield but at least if you have co-crops they get winter kill like the little picture says there you have a co-ver in the soil okay that are in the spring that is not gonna move water if it's to wet but at least it's gonna protect it from soil erosion so all these research and interceding if we do a summary really the successful establishment with interceding or aerial seeding really depends largely on rainfall if you get a nice rainfall after you intercede or are a really seed then you get a co-crop if you don't get rainfall two weeks you don't get a co-crop and waste your seed now in the drill one interceded you get a better chance because you got a soil to seed contact of getting established but if you see too early then the shade can kill your co-crops now co-crops have different tolerance to shade of the ones we've used on the experiment Sarah Rye is the one that has the most tolerance to shade and then Oat and Barley and then reclover, Harwich, P&5ing have horrible tolerance to shade in brassicas don't do well at all okay depends a year you you have really good moisture but radish turnips don't do very well in shade so if you want to drill them after the crop that's when you want to use them but interceding when we saw this project we we thought interceding was a much better solution but we didn't realize that the competition for light is too great so it really doesn't work too much now with the interest on 16 inch corn there's a lot people are gonna start doing this now and in 16 inch corn now you're gonna have light so it's gonna be a complete different system and that'll be interesting to see what happens with that interceding and sowing it has to be very late because early doesn't work at all and corn works something and I work that my colleagues did I am part of this project but I didn't do it Dr. Chatterjee and so for 30 he's working on sugar beet in color crops in sugar beet this is some of slides from his students eyelash and the concept here was a little bit different than other color crops in sugar beet since we're not producing grain the green foliage of the core crop is not gonna cause a problem with harvest but it should be this a crop where we have tremendous soil or ocean in the spring and in the fall because when the harvester takes the roots and then the soil still there's nothing to hold the soil and also we have problems with nitrate a lot are leaching nitrates sure if it's a fertilizer with high amounts of nitrates and the problem is when this nitrate moves too deep in the soil it actually produces a reduction in sugar content if the plant has too much nitrogen so here the core crops have a little bit of a different objective other than soil erosion and neutral losses actually picking up some of that excess nitrate can help the sugar be quality and so the questions really where can we intercede these crops we try different crops and when we intercede these crops can we do these to protect the soil without compromising yield right we don't want to reduce sugar be yield or quality and so we don't know this is something I think we're the first one and I'm the issue Dr. Charlie to start these type of research to see if this is something we could do it was a very interesting research we tried right winter Carolina winter shrimpy mustard interceded at two different planting dates and this is been then two years in a row one in June and one in July those are the same dates and those years the results are changing every year but this picture show you the interest of what we really want to do this is what the soil looks like after we harvest the sugar beet and we don't have a cover crop growing in the spring this picture was taken in the spring you see where this right was planted last year between the there's still even the harvester went through the middle of the row was not disturbed so you still have that right in there so that right is holding into the soil somebody said well how am I plant on that right that's gonna be a problem but there's a lot of things we we have to deal with but having that crop there you're using solar ocean and you're moving water out of the soil for whatever next crop it is so the results show that by interceding these cover crops right each one the the biomass yield here this is the biomass yield all the cover crops so right has the most biomass yield in the fall in the spring okay and Camelina had the leaves and we know that Camelina forms a rosette produce very little foliage but it produce cover kind of grows sideways and then these are the June and July biomass yield right so there was an effect of date across all the species of course those interceded later produce less biomass now what was interesting on these was what happened with root yield and quality there in 2018 actually the highest yield significantly higher than the control here than at least two of the other cover crops was you see mustard had a higher value although if you look at the letters they're not quite they're not really significant but you can see that at least we didn't get a lost on yield by having these cover crops in between what is really interesting is the sugar content as the crop significantly although you see here differences not too much but but in sugar and sugar the sugar content only 1% of increase in sugar content can signify about $80 per ton you know $80 per acre of gaining so a 1% difference is significant in sugar beet we didn't get quite 1% difference but you can see the highest sugar content on these and significantly different than control where on those they had cover crops in it okay and so what we think in is happening we're moving some of the nitrogen away from the sugar beet and nitrate excess nitrate reduces the sugar content so we're moving it away now the year after this the student did this again and the results were different especially well 2019 everyone knows it was a very difficult season very unusually cold and here what happened is the cover crops actually did reduce yield okay not all of them but especially those planted in June reduced root yield compared to the control significantly the conditions weren't there so the crops actually grew faster than the sugar beet did and so they caused root yield now when they was planted in July actually the one with cover crops had a slightly higher although no significant than the control yield so in July the cost was much problem but it when planted in June it did cause reduction and we don't want to see that and in the sugar content we couldn't observe the same exact responses last year although there was a trend to show something similar that the roots with cover crops where we have cover crops these have a higher sugar content although statistically because of the variation wasn't significant we could see there were some interesting things but when we have a crop like planted in July actually was a lot lower now one thing that could happen too you have lower yield right we had that where we had a winter right we also had lower yield when you have lower yield you tend to concentrate sugar in the roots so it might be just a concentration result so the summer is and they're going to do these this year again okay because it's an interesting thing um to do because we can get a cover in the soil and then if we don't reduce yield and can increase sugar that's that would be very uh important so interceding um in selection species in is you see there's difference depend what crops you have I know this year they're going to change some of the crops I think they're going to put flags they're going to put some some other ones they're trying different things early planting has very good crop stand but also you in some years you could reduce root yield uh the the protection from the ocean especially on the next spring if you have a winter crop is it's very interesting and it's something that it would be very good for sugar growers and uh that uh scavenging of nitrate excess nitrate and nitrate lead to increase of sugar content is is a very important result and if they this can happen it's something that people might want to do because that's actually economical if you can increase your sugar content in one percent so right can be effective for control and now well this was this has been done only in small plots and some farmers are interested in trying a large acreage and see if they can protect their soil from the ocean and then grazing um grazing I'm really interested in that I work in forages I think cover crops uh provide nutritious uh you know forage especially in mixes now how to do these mixes depends of pretty much when you're planting when you're doing and what are you doing okay it's very variable and depends on the farmer the type of animal what are you doing so before going to this I wanted to show just these graphs to show you and this is for any forage whether it's a mix or whatever uh as the dry matter yield of a forage goes up that means as it matures right the quality goes up and that's for any plant okay the the more mature the plant the less the forage quality is going to be and this is gonna have uh this is gonna work when in the mix is the same thing okay so what is forage quality or nutritive value it really is not depending on the composition of the plant so much but in the animal performance so that's my cow can can my cow increase in weight if I feed them these are the forage so there's different things that you're gonna hear when when you talk about um these annual forages or cover crops for for for grazing right and there are things that they're gonna give you the the forage quality depends on nutritive value or voluntary intake you have to take the intake right you can have a forage with very very high nutritive value the cow doesn't like and doesn't eat it you know it doesn't work right so we have the chemical compositions and important um the types of the fiber the different components here fiber protein protein is not the only thing is important in quality forages um digestibility or well or energy content that we usually translate in something called total digestible nutrients and other things retention time so we have a forage it has so much water and very highly digestible like the brassicas it goes through the room and the system so fast that the the nutrients are not useful yeah they don't they're not used accessibility and acceptability are important right so the the cover crops or forage you're gonna use have to do a little bit with animal requirements and I'll show you very general um for it changes with the type of animal for a 1200 pound cow with a calf these are more or less the pounds of forage consume per day and pounds of forage consume per month and then in the graphs it shows the protein right we're about three uh percent protein three pounds not percent three pounds of crude protein per day right if a cow consumes 35 pounds of forage a day that's it needs such forage with about 8.5 percent crude protein now for total digestible nutrients they need 17 pounds per day and this is all on dry matter so at 35 pounds per day consumption you need 48 percent TDN in the forage okay and I want you to remember these when I show you these are the average crude protein and TDN values for these cover crops that we can grow them alone or we can mix them if you notice you remember here put them on the side these are the values that we have from the other slide right 8.5 protein and 48 TDN if you look at these values and these are things that we run in North Dakota uh the the usual time that we raise them and you see everything is higher than that all the forages are higher than 8.5 percent and all the forages are higher than the 48 percent so this means that all these forages doesn't matter in a long or a mixture at the raising time they all meet the requirements of a 1200 pound cow with a calf which is what most farmers are trying to feed okay so um a lot of people talks a lot about oh no add a lot of legends because I need the quality if it's beef cattle you don't need that much more quality the cover crops all of them are reaching that so we did an experiment trying to mix different cover crops mixes with a forest sorghum as a base but also fox and millet and per millet and trying to see uh and this is was a little bit for preventive planting what should we plant if we plant like sometime in june okay what mixes of legion brassicas warm season cool seasons okay uh what what city race should i use what's a racing window and what happens with a shift and botanical composition and this is was really interesting on these crops so we have um 12 different mixtures mixtures 1 through 7 we're a mix of grasses that you see the different forages of cover crops there and mixture 8 to 12 were of just a monoculture of sorghum sudan or forest per millet and it's 100 one of those and um and here you can see yield we had two cats in the summer this was planted the first week of june right and for the different mixtures and you have only here uh you can see that except for mixture one and two and i'll explain more about them all the mixes no matter how what crop or how much seed they have they're not different in yield to the monocultures of sorghum or they're not different at all okay and then in um and then the second cat we had some that produced a little more and they regroup uh but they still weren't significantly different the only one it was different it was one which is a annual rye grass base mixture with chicory plantain and reclover but like someone said it's it's like the comparison wasn't fair because really annual rye grass is a it's a crop that if you are going to raise the issue raise it every 15 days right so if we would have done that we probably would have got almost as much as the other one annual rye grass keeps growing as you raise it so you don't raise it then it doesn't grow so we use the same two uh cuts as for the other one so it's a fair comparison and fair comparison now the mixture two uh was more of trying to see for a fall seeded brassica mixture for so you have only one cut because it was planted in july right it was planted much later for production but you can see that uh the production just planted later was was uh over one ton per acre of these brassicas now what is interesting on these um is how the percentages uh the percentages of the grasses and the legumes and the brassicas changes with the cut okay as you see here in general in general all the mixtures they have sorghum or millet you'll see that the sorghum and millet one of them is dominating the mixture right here millet is 69 percent 12 percent is the forest sorghum okay and the first cut here forest sorghum is 42 percent here is 94 percent here 30 percent now we cut it and then the second cut which it came uh at the end of september we shift to mainly these grasses right 59 percent now the sorghum now the millet went down so sorghum has the ability of regrow really fast after this cut and it takes over most of the mixtures you see in the the next one here another thing that it's important to know because a lot of people like to put legumes into mixtures is the legumes only survive at the beginning the for the first cut after the first cut the legumes pretty much disappear from the mixture you see here the red clover it was low but then disappeared okay here we didn't have a legume here we have p from 17 percent of the mixture went down to zero fadding went down to zero okay so um you look in the other mixtures the same thing uh legumes uh once they get harvested they don't have much regrowth power so you won't have that much of the mix but you shouldn't worry right because we already I already showed you that the nutritive value of all these crops is still above of the requirement of cup now uh the brassicas are the ones that do something the opposite right you see here the radish was six percent now it's 21 right so brassicas tend to grow more after they've been cut too so they're gonna and they like to grow on cooler sea cooler seasons so they're gonna regrow for the fall so here is where we're starting to see those plants and that's why we have this cream and planted in July because these brassicas they they would put both of them and both of them about half and half of the mixture for the fall so the the this study really shows it and and I think I want to show you uh is the rates of sorghum are very very low right two pounds per acre most of the recommendations go about five and even 10 and the problem is if even with this low rate you're still getting most of the mix of of sorghum if you put a lot more that's all you're gonna get so you have to give a chance to the other species on your mixture so you want to have a diversity of plants in your mixture you have to reduce your sorghum or millet rate to give a chance to the legumes at least to be there for the first cat to get a chance for the brassicas to be able to regrow for the second cat you see in this treatment everything pretty much is gone uh even the oats on the second cat is not very good and and the second cat the vmr sorghum took over and it's 80 percent of the mixture for the second cat okay so um we're gonna repeat that this year and they say what has been an interesting um if they're interesting study so what we learn with this uh the forest sorghum millet and dominate the mix even at low rates okay so keep that in mind uh the forest sorghum regains faster than any of the cobalt crops uh the way evaluated and dominating the mix for full grazing um forest sorghum yields about the same uh and mixtures are a lot so by putting more mixtures you're not getting any more than the sorghum alone so that's another reason not to put so much seed right you're not getting any more uh by reducing the seed rate of sorghum uh legumes are usually gone after the first cat so it's an interesting crop to have there to fix nitrogen to increase protein but that's gonna work for the first cat they've gone after that uh brassicas uh they're usually gonna tend to increase for full grazing so and brassicas are highly digestible and with the mix of the grasses you have in there whether it's oats or sorghum or millet then it's gonna be a very good grazing mixture okay so uh those are the things we learn with this and uh and also that those mixtures where you don't put a sorghum especially we're talking about false season mixtures if you don't put a sorghum or millet on your mixture your yield is gonna be a lot lower so the sorghum and millet are giving the the bulk of the yield to your mixture you need forest right and they give a lot of the fiber and the other components add to the quality but if you want yield you have to have this uh grow fat you know crops they grow fast in the summer and so this is a mixture also in a farmer's field they had some grazing corn and you can see radishes and this one was like a dayway ten-way mixture with those crops in there um these pictures taken right before it was grazing this has a lot of forage we calculate how like two and a half tons per acre of forage of dry matter uh you here you can see what happened with brassicas brassicas are really interested because they're very frost-toured and this picture was taken really late in the season they can survive to November and even the cows can graze it and take them out of the snow and so that's an interesting component for fall or winter grazing and these hot cows pretty happy you know was hungry and it's pretty happy and so thank you for that and thanks for listening to this present presentation if you have any questions uh you can send me an email and I'll try to answer that thanks so much uh that was great thank you Marisol um I'm looking at see I have two more questions so first thanks Scott for handling all the technical stuff um yeah that's it's tough with these online webinars to make sure that everything goes very smoothly and we're really lucky to have Scott at NDSU to to help us with that um so Marisol said she's only available for about 10 questions because she's got to get to the next uh Zoom meeting at 1215 so does anybody have any questions for Marisol and I will ask a question of Marisol so we've been talking about the standing corn um 2019 unharvested corn that's out there and um an options for that I know I'm going to fly on some oats and I don't know Marisol if you have some other ideas or what you think about how to manage some of the unharvested corn out there using cover crops yeah I had a question from a farmer um I think uh you know the problem is not if it's wet under there with the corn no harvest it's not going to dry you won't be able to harvest it likely you won't be able to plant anything on that field uh this year and um I think putting a cover crop is a great idea because otherwise the wheats are going to start coming up in between those rolls and so I think flying oats is a great idea depends what else you want to do during the summer you might want to add other crops like if you are gonna if you have a possibility of grazing you might want to uh even if you get a harvest really late you might be able to harvest graze the stubble and you have some other green stuff in between there so you want to um if you you think that you might be able to raise it later in the summer or fall maybe you can add a legume like pea or something like that I wouldn't spend too much money on it because it's just kind of like a solution but at least if you have something green going on in there um it would be nice to uh to get something moving water now unfortunately pc is kind of too big for for flying it and on but maybe another legume maybe uh I don't like clovers usually but maybe in this case you the clover will will help a little you know to put some nitrogen on that soil it's a difficult situation I I was talking to me before I don't think we never had this problem or having to fly cover crops actually in the spring or not harvest a corn but it is a problem for those that couldn't harvest it so um let's see have another question in here when talking about cover crops that capture nutrients that could otherwise be lost how do we estimate the release of those nutrients over the following crop year that's from your new grad student herself no thank you for the question that's a really good question and it's actually one that we've been trying to answer Dr. Fransen and and our project has been done like three years already of research trying to find us and for everything we've seen um you can't capture quite a bit of nitrogen in the fall but it's not going to be available for your next crop that's what we hope but all the data in not only here in another states in Wisconsin and Matt Workley the same you just don't get the credits for like if you're going to plant corn next year I think it's because our seasons are too short or maybe just there's not enough time Dr. Fransen is looking at different reasons why this is happening could do too with some immobilization of ammonia into the clay particles there are different theories but we are not seeing the nitrogen that you see on the biomass in the fall you're not seeing it going and be available for the next crop Abby you've been working with Dave Fransen too so that yeah and I think I think what I've been hearing from farmers too that are pretty intensively using cover crops in their systems is that they don't necessarily see the benefit the next year of those cover crops but it's a couple years down the road and and they're not sure when when they're taking their credits or anything they're they're slowly backing off on on fertilizer and some of their crops just to see what happens sorry I have somebody walking around with a tv show playing on a phone a little guy so if you can hear that I'm sorry but but yeah I mean as for now we're just asking people to leave check strips on their field where they where they apply the full rate nitrogen fertilizer after a cover crop to their next year's cash crop and then the rest of the field if they have to come back and add more nitrogen later then then they can do that but just have something to at least gauge whether you're seeing a release of nutrients or not depending on the conditions for the year yeah and the research that Matt worked in in Wisconsin he did show that in those in you know in this area that I apply manure if you apply manure and put cover crops you cannot count on those credits either so you can count on that so it's the same response they cover crops take it they help with that in the water you know so that's a very good thing right but that's it comes back to the system much later so I have one question from some farmers have been asking me about say they had a diverse cover crop mix the prior year you know with say barley in it or something like that and then they're coming back this year unfortunately some of them with another prevent plant situation after this last rain the fields were set up really well with the full season cover crop last year but but whether you know just conditions are bad this year so do they have to worry about any disease transfer between any of that that residue from the prior year's cover crop on pp with with this year's cover crop or say they go to something else that may cross-contaminate I don't know if I'm asking that very clearly but just disease transfer from from one year's cover crop over to the next year's or to a cash crop I don't know if you know anything about that or not I don't not much we know that from cereals to cereals you're transferring some fungal diseases and the roots like you know it's one of the problems the right can cause to corn and it will happen the same if you have right last year now you have oats you could have some diseases moving root diseases mainly but that's all I've heard that you have problems I I haven't heard of any anything really much of that and I don't think we have much science based data on that but I know Iowa has a couple research and publications they show in the right dust transfer root diseases to corn from one season to the next all right everyone thanks a lot for hearing and sorry for all that for that interference that at least I was hearing but I don't know what happened but thanks god for helping us with that and so sorry I have another meeting in two minutes so bye and thanks for listening to us you can hear the recording I think without interference if you go to the website we have everything posted on ndsu.edu slash soil health with the webinar tab all these webinars and other ones on graze and cover crops have been posted there and also on the ship program um so so yeah if anyone has any other questions let us know Marisol thank you for your time and and we'll see you next Tuesday Kevin Sadovic will be doing a briefing webinar on Tuesday so thanks everyone for joining us thank you bye