 Hi, I'm Mike Ostley, research agronomist here at the Carrington Research Extension Center. So today I'd like to take a few minutes with you to discuss one of the most complicated things we can do in our northern climates, and that's grow a cover crop with our full season corn crop. This has been something that more and more people have been interested in with the increased adoption of soil health practices. But because we have very few days without corn during the growing season, it's been a particular challenge. Now one of the main reasons that we're interested in this is not only for the soil health, but also for the livestock component. It's a great opportunity to have dual use of your acres, if you not only have that corn stover out in the field, but also some green nutritious material for the livestock to graze either late in the fall or early in the following spring. So one of the reasons why this is a challenge is, yeah, we have this great looking corn crop out here, and this time of the year when a lot of cover crops are being seeded after spring wheat, we still have all this shade in our corn crop. And so we have a situation where there's not a lot of growth potential because of the corn that's overshadowing our cover crop. Now there's a few different things we do to try and overcome this. So one of the things that we've been looking at recently is the idea of a wide roll corn, where we plant our corn intentionally on something like a 60 inch spacing in order to allow more sunlight down into the canopy later on in the season. By doing that we get much better cover crop growth, and ideally we're still studying it, but we hopefully don't lose a lot of our corn yield, but we're still kind of on the beginning stages of that front, and so we'll find out as we go. So here's a little bit of what I'm talking about. So when we plant our cover crop in our corn, we're putting this in around early July or late June, kind of in the V4 to 6 leaf stage on the corn. And we're planting strips between each of our corn rows or some people might broadcast and hope for a rain. On the edge of the corn here at this time of the year, you have some really nice looking cover crops here, something along that looks like this. But in the center where you don't get as much sunlight, we only have something that looks like this. If you have a nice early fall, we may be able to harvest the corn and still get a lot of late season growth, because the turnips and radishes and some of the other cool season crops will still grow pretty late in the fall, even after the first freezes. But if we have a late fall, like 2019, you're never going to get anything like this in the middle of your standard spacing corn crop. So there's a few alternatives. We can either move our grazing from the fall to the spring. So in that case, we'd be focusing on having winter annuals as our cover crop. So our winter annuals, like our rye or maybe even something like a camelina, will still come back to you the following spring, even if it's seeded in the middle of the summer, the prior summer. And so this would be a great opportunity to still be able to take advantage of the cover crop growth the corn year, but grazing the cattle the following season prior to your next crop. Right now that's looking like one of the more likely scenarios. However, if you do have a wide row corn, allowing that more of that sunlight to get to the bottom is very realistic that you should be able to have a full season corn crop. And then maybe November still have a window to graze, which should be a lot more biomass than you would get with a narrow row. So I hope this helps to clarify some of what we're doing out here and what some of the options might be for cover crops and corn up here in the Northern Plains. Thank you for your time today.