 I'm Anberto Blanco, I'm a professor in soil management and applied soil physics at the University of Nebraska here in Lincoln. We are here in the land of the Huskers. So it is exciting to talk about cover crops because there is a lot of enthusiasm about cover crops. So what we have been doing is looking at grazing cover crops. So we know that cover crops provide a lot of benefits, they cover the soil, increase organic material content, they do improve microbial processes, all that good stuff. But what about providing feed to animals? So we have been looking at here in Nebraska how does cover crop grazing affect soils and crop yields. So we had our own farm site and some research site. So after three years of research we found that cover crops can be grazed with no problem. We have looked at compaction, water infiltration, some soil fertility and crop yields and we have not seen a large negative effects on compaction, water infiltration and crop yields. So what does this mean to the bottom line? It means that probably we should be integrating cover crops with livestock. That's something that's missing. When we talk about, for example, soil health we talk a lot about covering the soil, diversifying the crop systems and using conservation tillage but we don't talk much about bringing the animals back to where they should be, to the fields. We have these animals and feed lots but I think it is time to integrate crops, in this case cover crops with livestock and we have not seen many negative effects of that integration. So I don't want to be biased on this as a researcher but I would push for that integration because animals provide a lot of benefits. They return manure, increase organic matter content and there are so many other benefits that that integration can provide in the long term. My name is Lindsay Anderson. I'm from Missouri. I got my undergraduate degree in soil science at the University of Missouri Columbia. I came here this summer to the University of Nebraska to get a master's in soil science. I'm very excited to start here to see in Nebraska they do a lot of interdisciplinary research. So my research is a long term study on cover crop grazing. So I've worked a lot with animal scientists. So we were looking at cover crop grazing in eastern Nebraska, corn soybean rotation. The corn is corn silage and high moisture corn. And the results that we're seeing so far is there's no significant negative impacts on soil health parameters or on yield. Some of the soil health parameters I was looking at are interaction between the physical, biological and chemical properties. We looked at soil fertility, macro micronutrients, CEC, physical properties. We looked at water infiltration, compaction parameters such as bulk density and penetration resistance. And we're also looking at biological components which is kind of the new and upcoming thing in the field. So looking at microbial biomass and diversity, community structure. Hi, I'm Serena Roos. I am a postdoctoral associate at UNL. I'm originally from central Minnesota, but I did my undergrad, master's and PhD at Wisconsin before coming here to UNL. And I grew up on a strawberry farm and I fell in love with everything, plants and soils. So that's why I'm here and working with cover crops and soil health. So our goal was to evaluate how cover crop grazing impacts the bottom line. And so we have a couple of sites here in Nebraska. They are on farm sites where we had cover crops that were grazed. And we contacted the farmers so that we knew kind of how that grazing of cover crops and using the cover crops changed their management practices. And for our two sites in Nebraska that we were looking at, one was in near Tecumseh and one was near North Platte and they actually both showed positive net returns when those cover crops were grazed. The degree of net return really depended on the management, whether or not they had a high stocking rate and the one also fertilized their cover crops and that extra fertilizer allowed them to do higher grazing intensity and thus their net return was a little bit higher than the other site. Just as kind of a take home message, grazing cover crops based on these two sites, it appears that grazing cover crops can be either beneficial to the bottom line and definitely not negative.