 So the topic for this is trying to expand cover crop use through inter-seeding them into established plantings. Specifically, we've been working with vegetables, certainly a lot of this could be applied to other crops, but I can't speak to those directly. So there's a little bit about our farm, so we're located in Cannon Falls. We're about halfway between, in Minnesota, halfway between Minneapolis and Rochester. And we have about 20 acres, 12 or so acres in vegetables in any given year. We sell our produce through Farmers Market in downtown St. Paul, and wholesale accounts. And we're kind of restarting up a farm share CSA program this year. Beth mentioned I got a graduate student grant through SARE, so I did a master's program at Iowa State. I was looking at reduced tillage and cover crop use, so this is a related tech project that just came to mind for a few years into running our own farm. So really it's all interesting this came when I saw this in probably early April, a couple years ago. This is like really young winter rye growth. This was seeded the previous fall after pepper planting had completed harvest. And I'm looking at this and saying, I have to plant this in three weeks. We're getting virtually no benefit from this when we're planted that late. Winter rye can germinate and grow in really low conditions, which is great. But if you're not, if you don't have any meaningful cover through the winter and spring snowmelt, particularly if you've got to then plant it kind of as soon as it warms up, you're not even doing really much biomass. So I'm thinking how can we, we're growing a lot of peppers, probably three acres of peppers is a major crop for us. So I don't want to let that much land every year going to the winter with no cover crop on it. So what I want to see is something more like this. And so that's, yeah, that was kind of the question, how can we do that? And we certainly did not, did not invent the idea of interseeding. It's been done for a long time, but not very widely. And I hadn't had any experience with it. So I guess, do I need this at all? Which realize that I wasn't even talking into that, but I guess you can hear me. So, yeah, so we came up with the idea to interseed. Here's just a picture of a planting of peppers. This is a picture from our trial that we'll discuss. And you can see kind of our little carpet of cover crop seedlings there growing under very large established pepper plants. And we also grow some peppers on a plastic mold system. And so we thought we could also be adapting that so that we're planting the pathway between the plastic mulch, which is really, could be susceptible to a lot of water movement. Because most of the water green and heavy rain falls when we shed off of that plastic mulch and into the pathway. So we have those two ideas. And the main things that we're thinking about as we were laying out this project, trying to figure out what we wanted to test and what might work well is giving the cash crop a competitive advantage. So thinking about the difference in size so that you can plant a cover crop into a vegetable planting and hopefully not really reduce your yield of the process. We also needed the crop canopy to be sufficiently open so that we could physically get those cover crop seeds onto the soil and have some sunlight down there so the cover crop can get established. And the traits that we were looking for in a cover crop were low growing habit, so they're not going to be growing up and competing for light or choking out the plants. Something that isn't going to be readily going to seed and something that's traffic tolerant for tractors or just for when we're going through the least once a week harvesting, we didn't want to kill it in the process. And then ideally something that was a legume or otherwise not likely to be very nitrogen, heavy nitrogen feeding so that we were going to be competing with the crop. Okay, so here are the details of what we ended up proposing and carrying out this year. So we grew bell peppers for harvest at the green stage. Those were transplanted in the middle of May, which is our typical date for that. And we tested two different production systems. And these are really treated as like two side by side independent trials. So they weren't really designed to be compared. But I was curious to compare them just because plastic mulch use creates waste. There are reasons to do it. But we wanted to know if we were really getting a lot of benefits. So that was something I was interested in. But we did those two side by side trials. We ended up using Dutch White Clover and annual ryegrass in a mixture as our cover crop mix. And we decided we wanted to look at the timing of establishment. So we wanted to know, to try to identify the point of seeding that where we could not create a lot of competition with our cash crop. But still have enough canopy openness that we can get the cover crop growing. So in the fall, we had a good ground cover. And so we had different timings that we tested within each system. Because with plastic mulch, you're only seeding the pathway. And so you don't actually have really a lot of direct, it's a little more indirect competition because you're not, you don't have cover crop growing right around the plants. So we figured we could seed those pretty early. And we could have pretty much season long cover crop growth there. So the three different dates, we had three weeks before planting. So we actually went out, made the beds, interceded them three weeks before we transplanted the peppers. Then right at planting or three weeks after planting. And then we had a no cover crop as a control to compare it to. With the bare ground system where we were going to be seeding across the entire surface of the soil, we knew we needed to push that a lot later because there'd be a lot more potential for direct competition. So we looked at three weeks, five weeks, or seven weeks after planting and then had a no cover crop as a control. I'm going to try to refer to those just as early, mid, and late. Because I realized it was getting really confusing, especially because I have some overlap in those different seeding dates. So and then last thing to mention is that there was no replication in this. So it was really designed more like a proof of concept. Demonstration, I want to see it on kind of field scale just so I can feel what it was like to grow it in that way. Because I'm used to kind of clean cultivated rows. I mean, that's just what I'm used to. So that's just like, it's a cautionary there. The statistical significance of some of this might be a question. So I'm really more looking at trends and just take home messages for what we want to try in the future. Okay, we took a lot of data measurements. We're really just going to focus on the top three in this presentation because we don't have enough time. So we're going to look at yield, soil temperature, and then a little bit at some soil health measurements that we took. And the plot was laid out like this. So each of these experiments was on a eight bed by 200 foot long field, which is one of our standard units. And then we applied the different cover crop treatments to blocks within that. Okay, oh yeah, right. So I put an X through that. We had a bit of a mishap this past season. About two weeks after we established that mid planting of the cover crop, which is like five weeks after planting, and it was looking really, really good. There's miscommunication with my crew. They were supposed to cultivate the planting that would have been the late planting and stop when they reached the middle one. Well, they cultivated right through it. And it didn't totally kill everything, but the cover crop was substantially sparsely that it should have been, which is a bummer because as we'll get to, I feel like the sweet spot might have been somewhere between five and seven weeks as far as the ideal planting date. So the data are included in these results. But just keep that in mind that the five week after planting that middle seeding date for the bare ground system probably didn't have the stand that it really ought to have had. Okay, so jumping into yield. And just kind of a quick overview, we're going to talk about the results. And then, so we're going to have a bunch of graphs, and then we're going to have a bunch of pictures. So the pictures we'll go through, we'll give some like practical tips. How did we seed the cover crops? What are some of the things that we observed? What did those plantings look like throughout the season? So you can get a visual sense of what it looked like. But we're going to first just talk about what did we actually see in the results. So this is the total yield in the plastic culture system under those four different seeding dates. This should be pretty close to marketable yield. We basically left all the obvious culls in the field. There might have been a few that got culled during the washing pack process. And these were taken in the field, but should be pretty close. So we didn't see that the system that didn't have a cover crop planted have a highest yield. Which is not that surprising. Obviously we were hoping that we wouldn't see much of a yield drag. And in my mind, 20,000 pounds of peppers per acre is still a pretty good yield. And there are other benefits that we're getting. So I feel like there's still some pretty good promise to this. And if we push that seeding date even later, or maybe change the species that we used, then it could work even better. So we're still really encouraged by this and planning to continue working with it. These are those same numbers, but broken out by harvest date. So you can see they started out fairly high. So there was a pretty big early harvest here. The blue, most of these are color-coded. So the blue is always going to represent the no cover crop. And then the red is the early and the green is the late. So following a similar trajectory across the season, but the blue ended up with the highest yield in this case. Now this is the total yield in that bare ground system. So the no cover crop had technically the highest yield. They were much closer, only separated by maybe five or six percent. So in my mind, this is probably statistically about the same. So I was really encouraged to see that these, the mid and late seeding dates for the interseeding really didn't seem to have an effect on the yield. Notice that this red bar is quite low here. And I'll show you some pictures of this. We very early discovered that three weeks after planting is too early to intercede the cover crop. It was just very obviously choked out and there's a lot of competition there. And so we'll see that throughout. So this is again breaking it off by harvest over the course of the season. One thing to note just generally is if you compare this one to the plastic mulch, we had much higher early yields, which sort of makes sense that we would have warmer soils up. And but if we look at the totals, we had an average of over 30,000 pounds per acre of peppers here. The yield was actually higher in the system without plastic mulch, which was really interesting for me to know. And then again, that three week after the early seeding date there was just abysmal throughout the year. Okay, so soil temperature. We put dataloggers about four inches deep. And those were reporting the temperature every hour throughout the whole season. So we have a ton of data. So these numbers are really strong here. We mainly took measurements in the bare ground system where we were interested in whether that cover crop would be decreasing the temperature in the soil. The plastic culture system, because the cover crop's growing in the pathway, we didn't think that was going to have much of an impact on the soil temperature around the plant roots. We did put one sensor though in one of those under the plastic mulch just to kind of be able to see the temperature differential in the plastic versus the soil based. So I included the black bar is that one sensor that we had in the plastic mulch. And then the color bars all are before those four different seeding dates in the bare ground system. So basically the take homes here, black bar was always the highest. So not surprisingly, the soil was the warmest in the plastic mulch. The blue bar, which is the no cover crop plot in the interceded experiment was also the highest. So those two, which we would kind of expect, that's what we would have guessed. Once we hit July here, which was when those early seeding dates would have been starting to get more mature, we started to see a temperature drop in that early planted cover crop indicating that we were further reducing the temperature with all of that heavy cover crop growth in the understory. And that was consistent here during the kind of the warm months, July and August. We saw them start to level out in September. And by October, that plot actually had one of the warmest temperatures, which would tell me that the same thing that would keep it cool, that insulative effect of having that ground cover had the reverse effect in the fall of having it actually not cool down quite as fast as the other treatments did. This is looking at the same thing, but just throughout the whole year, again, this top line is the plastic culture. The blue line is that early interceded date in the bare ground system. And so you can kind of see those carried out throughout the season. Except for, towards the end, we hit September. We started to see them get closer together and kind of overlap. So the biggest difference was probably July and August temperature. And then I wanted to see if the change in temperature from day to night would be different. And they kind of follow that same hypothesis. So this is the no cover crop here, the blue and the red bars have the biggest swing from day to night. They were getting warmer in the day, and so that swing was greater. Whereas this red bar is that early, really heavy, heavily cover cropped plot. And that was staying a lot more consistent from day to night. Okay, so we sent soil samples at the end of the season to the Cornell lab. And they have like a full soil health analysis package. And so I've got a few things graphed up on here. Soil protein, soil respiration, and active carbon. There were some other measurements they had as well, aggregate stability, a bunch of chemical and other physical properties. And overall, I was pretty disappointed that like a lot of our ratings were in the middle of the road, or in some of the cases they were quite low. And as an organic farmer using cover crops, I want to think that we're doing a really good job. But the truth is we're using a motivator for more of most of our soil prep. And we are planting vegetables in there every year. We don't have enough land to have like an out year rotation to just do cover crops. And so I've been doing a lot of like introspection about our own management to try to bring those numbers up. But there were some interesting, I think trends that we saw here. And maybe I'll just mention those. And then Abby is going to say a few words about kind of what these mean and how you should be thinking of those in relation to your soil health. So basically more is better is the long and short of it here. And the blue and the red bars are the early and the late seeding dates in that bare ground system. And so those tended to be the highest in each of these categories. The one I was surprised about was the, we took a sample from the plastic culture pathway where we had probably the most vigorous cover crop growing with the exception of the early bare ground seeding date. And that was quite low. And I think there's probably quite a bit of compaction that this soil felt quite compacted. But I was surprised. I thought that we would have a lot more activity because there was a lot of cover crop growth, a lot of redactivity. But I'm guessing that just the physical structure of the soil was probably a little bit degraded. And that may have been a common factor. So do you want to just mention a few things about these? I can. I mean if anyone wants to hear about some of this stuff. We've screwed around with some of the soil health measurements here in North Dakota quite a bit. So we have one of our large projects called the share farm in southern part of the state. And we sampled I think it was 80 some points across that quarter. And we did pretty much every soil health test measurable possible on those samples. Kayleigh Gash did that. She's our soil health researcher. And one of the things that we found is that a lot of these tests, especially the Cornell one out of New York, right, is not calibrated for our systems here in the northern plains. And so some of the things that we were finding that were important and weighted in those tests coming out of Cornell where you get a soil health score, in particular were weighted on organic matter. That's being really, really important. While our Red River Valley soils, our soils in North Dakota, because it's so cold and there's not much time for decomposition, are just generally high in organic matter. So our scores coming back for a field that would be disc rip, chisel cloud, field cultivated, two crops in rotation, no cover crop use, would come back with scores in like the 90s. And so you get that. You're like, wow, I'm doing really good things. My soil health is high. And it's like, well, though your organic matter is high, the rest of your system, look at the aggregations, look at the biological, everything else is really low. But because there's so much weight put on our organic matter, that's what bumps the score really high. So you should feel good. Don't feel good. Don't feel bad about what you're doing, because you have a really nice baseline. Your system is just not, some of these tests just aren't calibrated for your system. And I think what we're finding is aggregation is probably one of our best tests that we can do, because it's one that changes very quickly. Aggregates formed by roots and fungal hyphenol, all those things wrapping around soil of particles and holding them together. So those things, when you get more roots in the system with cover crops or diversified rotation or something like that, you're getting more of those aggregates to form more quickly. And then with that, we're trying to use the active carbon, which has a really good number for the early planting and late planting. The active carbon is the pool we're looking at as a total organic matter, because that's the pool that's getting the recent inputs. And that's where you're going to see a change in management. That's also the pool that assumes you change something in the soil where you utility or you do something different. That's the pool that reflects those changes. So we're hopeful that that pool, that form of organic matter is going to be the one that's going to tell us the most about changes in management. So that's kind of where we are with it. It's a lot of tests, though. Yeah. Did any of the soil tests you did indicate about soluble salts levels? Because I know a lot of vegetable producers in North Dakota struggle with salt. Especially with vegetable production, because we have to do a lot of irrigation and we have to outline water to match the cover crops and the difference. Do they show any difference there with the different types of trade? With everything we do, we look at soluble salts, right? I mean, that's actually with one of the soil testing labs, one of our regional labs, that's going to be included in the soil health package that you could get. So it would be aggregates to active carbon. Total organic matters because everybody wants that number and then soluble salts would be the fourth thing. I'm not sure that we saw huge changes right off the bat. I think those take a couple of years because salts are so mobile and everything is moving throughout the system all the time. But anything you're doing to use moisture with cover crops to manage water is going to manage the salts because the salts are in the water. So any of those practices getting more residue on the surface is really going to help because that's going to reduce evaporation and having the cover crops there to manage the water and the water table is going to be critical. So I think those changes, in seven or eight years that we've been measuring soluble salts under these changes and practices, we're not seeing a huge drop in salts in the surface. We're seeing a little. It's not significant. But I think that overall when we look at the field, even though it's not seeing a change in the measurement, the crop is better. Everything is better on that field because soybeans are growing where they would never grow before because we have residue there and we have water management, we have cover crops. So I don't know if you'd be able to measure it, but I think you'd be able to see it in your crop. I'm just curious how this could be applied in high-summel issues because that is where we really have salt issues because we don't have the natural rainwater that helps naturally run those salts through the system. And so I know a lot of times we try to use some cover crops to help break up some of that salt levels. And I'm curious if that we can put things into production while we're doing those cover crops that would be for producers that means you don't have to turn half of your production area down for a whole year. It's just... That sounds like a great Sarah problem. I think Beth is waiting for the proposal now. That kind of wraps up the results that we're going to show you. And so the basic conclusions that I've taken is that in general, there's a lot of potential for this interesting thing to work. We're going to definitely continue to experiment with it. The plastic culture pushed for higher early harvest, but overall didn't increase yield and actually it was a little bit lower than without plastic mulch. So that's a good thing to know. The best seeding date of the most promising I think is probably the right-up planting time, which is that mid-seeding date. It didn't seem to help at all to go early and that's just kind of a pain in the butt. And the later you wait, the more you have to actually cultivate prior to establishing the cover crop. And the shorter the period of time you're actually covering as well with the cover crop. But it might be that we're going to see that 50 to 20 percent yield decline. If we do that, you might be able to avoid that by interceding later. And I've got a couple of pictures. We decided to just intercede all of our other plantings about six or seven weeks after planting. And everything that was outside of this study just because it felt right. And I really don't think it had that late to have any impact on our yield. And then in the bare ground system, I think somewhere in that five to seven weeks after planting would probably be the sweet spot. And I wish we had better data from the five to seven, from the mid-planting date. But there's also a lot of other benefits you get. So we notice, for one, it's really nice. You get two inches of rain and it's not mud. You can walk in there after a heavy rain and you go harvest. The fruit tended to be cleaner because there wasn't soil splashing up there. And then you get protection from the soil during the season. I think more so with the plastic mulch system. You know, because there's a lot better stands throughout the season with the bare ground stopping you, you're planting it relatively late. So you're getting a lot of heavy rains during a time of year where you really don't have any good cover crop growth. But you get some of that later in the season. You get some good weed control. And then you enter the fall with a mature cover crop. That's going to be providing a lot of services to that field. It's good in the fall, winter, and the fall and spring. So yeah, now I want to just take us out with some, it's both paper images, slideshow with just a little bit of kind of how-to side of it and then give you a little tour throughout the year, kind of what the plots look like. So to establish the cover crop, we use this drop seeder for most of the plots in this trial. We need something that's going to be at least as wide as the space between the edges of the plastic mulch. Because you really do want to get the entire soil surface covered in seeds. Otherwise, if you have open areas, they're likely to grow to weeds and you don't really have a good way to control, other than mowing. But what we ended up doing is for, when we, like I said, we went and just like did two acres of this, we used this jug, seven gallon water drink, you can buy it on Amazon, probably Home Depot, drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom, and then just walked down the pathway, just kind of shaking. And it worked, it worked great. I got some pictures from some of the plots that we did that in. So that's a really easy solution. And the reason we did that is because the plants were too big. You couldn't, we couldn't physically fit the drop seeder behind when we were doing it this late in the season. And so it was pretty great. You know, these are mostly small seeded things that we're going to be using for this inter-seeding. Just a cautionary thing, we noticed that you get heavy rain after, because we're not incorporating these seeds at all. So we're just surface sowing them, they'll germinate great on the surface if they get watered in. If you get a heavy rain, or if you put too much water on with irrigation, which we sort of did when we were calibrating our new traveling gun, you can wash a lot of the seed right off the shoulders of those beds. So you can, it's a little hard to see here, but there's, there's basically like very low percentage of seeds growing there, and it's like way thick rain in the center. So a lot of the seeds just kind of wash down. Now, ultimately this plot still was, was okay, but we got some weeds that would grow there, but we couldn't mow them. But that's just something to bear, to keep in mind as you're doing this. In the, the bare ground system, we just broadcast the seeds across there. So in, with the plot setup we have, we use one of these, you know, 40 bucks from, from Johnny's kind of thing. On a larger scale, you can use a cone seeder like that to just broadcast those seeds throughout the field. You really need to cultivate thoroughly before you inter-seed. If you have weeds growing, when you inter-seed, you're going to have weeds growing all year. So doing really good clean weed control up until the point of inter-seeding is pretty important. And, you know, we figured out what was too early in this, in the bare ground system. So three weeks, especially with our, the cover crop mix that we used, it was really evident early on that we were going to have a lot of competition between those. Angular Ryegrass was one we chose because it shows up in a lot of publications about like good suitability for inter-seeding. I have read, I believe in one of the, the Sarah cover crop book, that it tends to be a biennial in cool climates. I interpreted that to mean I could seed it and it's not going to go to seed until the next year. Well, I had never grown Angular Ryegrass before, and it does go to seed. So in every single plot, probably six weeks after we planted, it started to bolt. And so that meant, A, we had weed seed problems, and B, you know, instead of being a low-growing crop that's going to kind of stay below the canopy, which is putting up these seed heads all over, and those are growing up through your plants and stuff. So that was something we learned. We will not use Angular Ryegrass when we're seeding at this point. I'll show you right at the end. We did do a planting later in the summer that worked great, but that was definitely a take-home for us. Got a couple of pictures from a different farm. These are from Harmony Valley Farm in Veropa area, Wisconsin, and they've done some experimenting with inter-seeding. Did hear onions? They actually used a creeping red fescue mixed with white clover. I haven't talked about how it worked, but the pictures look good. So I would like to find out. I think that's one that we might try experimenting with in the future. But this is what it looked like here after we pulled the plastic mulch out. So just something to keep in mind. If you're thinking of going out and inter-seeding between plastic, you got to pull plastic out at the end of the year. And then I've got some, just some pictures here. They're all dated, so you can kind of get a sense of what the peppers and what the cover crop looked like in these different plots throughout the year. So middle of June, it's a month after the peppers were transplanted, and this is that early planting date. So this is probably, no, the curly. So this cover crop was actually seeded three weeks before we planted the peppers. And just kind of moved down, June 21st, July 4th. Peppers are getting bigger. Cover crop gets shorter sometimes because we mowed it. So this is probably after a mowing, which really nicely adunts he has the rows. August 7th. This is a picture from a different field, one of our main production fields of colored bell peppers. So this one was one of those ones that we just seeded. It was probably about seven weeks after transplanting, we went through with that jug and just put seeds down between the rows. It's really nice to harvest on a cover crop instead of just going through the month. Here's a field of habaneros we did the same thing with. And I've got a shot from above so you can see there's two adjacent vets there and there's really nice coverage between the rows. Another picture, this is late October of after we pulled the plastic mulch out. So obviously we're not going to go into the winter with 100% coverage when we had at least 50% of the field covered in plastic, but probably 40% coverage right there, which is definitely going to help if we've got rain or snow melt, having those strips of vegetation are going to be reducing any of the erosion problems you might have. And then I don't turn up to not take as many pictures of the bare-hand plots as I should have, but here's one from the early seeding date. Here's that mid-seeding date that got so sadly cultivated here. So again, you can see that differential between the peppers and the cover crop. This is that mid-July, this is that early planting date. So this is still before we even have even harvested the pepper. We can already see that these plants are starting to see some competition. Another one, this is when we're, you know, August, so we're harvesting here. You can see some chlorosis and stuff from that competition with the cover crop from that early planting date. And then this is kind of cool. We had a neighbor who has a drone and does photography. And so we've got like a little virtual kind of, what if I can, I'll just leave it like that. So the first two cover crop plots here are those early seeding dates early and mid in the plastic culture. And then we're arriving at the plot with no cover crop. And then the late seeding date here at the end. They really even out, like early season, once you mow them, like they just all look the same. So, and then the bare-grounded plot was just right at the end here. So that's that first plot, that early seeding date. Heavy, weak competition, cover crop competition. And then the next plot. And I think, oh yeah, it's kind of perfect. So this right here is that mid seeding date. Pretty sparse here. You can see, it's not a great picture of it, but that's that seven week after planting that late seeding date. And there's very good cover crop underneath the other story of those plants. And then I'll just mention here, we've done some other experimentation outside of this with inter seeding. We routinely, after we finish our last harvest of asparagus, we'll do a full field wide field with till shallow. And then we'll incorporate a heavy rate of cow pee or forage, forage soybean, something like that. And then that all basically provides weed control throughout the year underneath the asparagus plants. We did a little experiment with hemp this year. And so that's, this is during harvest of some CBD hemp. And this is where we, this is all annual ryegrass there. This was seeded probably middle of August. And none of that stuff went to seeded from a really nice, nice carpet over that field. So it's a really nice feeling like harvest your crop and then you're just looking at a kind of crop in there.