 So to quickly introduce our farm, Sogan Valley Farm, we were established in 2015, and we're in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, which is zone 4A. And we have 12 acres in active diversified vegetable crops on our 30 acres of land. And we are, we've been certified organic from the start, although we've had portions of our land in transition as we as we expanded over the last five years. And our vegetables are going primarily to our customizable CSA program. And we grow about three acres of peppers. That's our primary wholesale crop. So I'll start by just giving a little bit of context about my background with reduced tillage and what its role is on our farm right now. My background, my experience with reduced tillage started about maybe seven years ago in graduate school, actually. I had been managing production on a CSA farm. And I learned about the system, the organic no-till system they were using at the Rodale Institute. Jeff Moyer wrote a book about it and got, you know, overnight got really excited about it. And as it turned out, my wife and I were moving down to Iowa for her graduate program. And I ended up being able to get into a master's program myself. So I spent two years doing some field experiment using like in the Institute cover crop mulch system that Jan described at the beginning of his talk. And we were actually laying the groundwork for starting this farm while I was still in grad school. And when we transitioned into this, we weren't really ready to try to apply that system across the board as there are several challenges that have been. And I'll describe some additional ones. So we do predominantly use pretty traditional tillage methods, although I like to think I'm as conscientious about it as I can be. But we've maintained an experimental aspect with reduced tillage. And it's still something that I spend a good deal of time thinking about. And most years that we've been farming, we've had some kind of a trial going on. And those will continue until, you know, we hope to find something that is, we feel works well, both on our scale and with our level of crop diversity and succession cropping. And, you know, we do hope to try to maintain profitability during this process and maintain a good quality of life. And, you know, that's, it's, it's a, it can, it can be a little bit of a tradeoff because as Alan mentioned, there's a lot of pre planning. It's a little bit more complicated to try to manage crops with these no till systems. So I'm going to, yeah, spend the next 15 minutes or so going over some of the systems that we've worked and worked with and what we've learned from them. So yeah, first is this Institute cover crop mulch system around here commonly using winter rye or cereal rye planted in the fall and killed with the roller crimper or a flail mower when it reaches anthesis. And then a cash crop can be planted through that mulch afterwards. And this is the area that I worked with in my, my grad school research. And we looked at both a no till planted system. And Yon actually made the distinction he called it rotational no till, which I think is for, for most folks is probably a more accurate term. It sounds like what Alan and folks are trying to do at a starter farm really is more true no till where, you know, even perennial weeds, you know, just get dug out by hand. But often there's going to be some degree of tillage, you know, if for no other reason than to establish the cover crop prior and incorporate residue. So that's how we set up this system. And we looked at both no till planting and strip till planting, which you see in the middle photo here. And the idea there being that we can concentrate tillage just in the crop row, where the crop can benefit more from the soil warming and aeration aspects that you get from tillage. And but we still maintain good good residue cover over the majority of the field. And yeah, in practice, I've found that that really can lead to just challenges with, with weed management, with, with these systems, whenever you have exposed soil, it can be trouble because it's, you know, difficult to impossible to use any kind of mechanical cultivation to control weeds. And, you know, I suspect I'm not alone in saying that I have a few weed seeds in my, in my soil. So I'm just going to share a few of the, the things that were take homes from me kind of practical considerations if you're thinking about trying this system on your farm. It's, it's really suited using winter rye, which is the most widely used and probably most reliable cover crop to use for a killed mulch like this. It can work well for crops that are planted once per season. And with a good planting date in early June, at least in, in Minnesota upper Midwest here, be about the right time. So early, early crops, late crops and crops that have like lots of successions throughout the season would need a different or a modified system. And a uniform and high biomass cover crop is essential. I think Jan said a perfect cover crop. So if, if you are coming in with a kind of a sparse or a late planted cover crop or you seeded and it didn't get any rain for the first month and it only germinated and late October, it's probably not going to, not going to work in this situation. And really increasingly, I'm feeling like the having some way to supplement mulch is a pretty key, a key for, for having this be a versatile system on a farm of our scale. And so whether that be a transferred cover crop biomass, like, like Jan discussed, or simply some kind of other straw or other bailed biomass that can be distributed onto the field, I think would increase the chances of success kind of year to year with this. And then, you know, the, the method for, for getting transplants into the ground and soil amendments without disturbing the mulch, I think can be a key challenge for, for, for many, many folks in our situation. And that the mulch check planter that, that Jan discussed is, I mean, I've spent a good deal of time watching videos and corresponding with, with Johannes about that, it's, it really does like totally solve, solve the problem of, you know, being able to have a heavy mulch on the soil surface so you can have good weed suppression, but still be able to both get fertilizer and transplants through there and have it close up tight without leaving exposed soil. And for the record, they are willing to ship to the U.S. So they have worked it out so they can, they can, they can send it here if, if someone wanted to buy it, but it is a very expensive machine. So it's, I think a three row unit was somewhere north of $45,000. I think that did not include the fertilizer hopper, if I recall. So, and then there's freight on top of that. So it's likely going to be a little prohibitive for someone on our scale or on my scale. I'll just speak for myself, who is doing it kind of more on an experimental basis, but really amazing technology that I think has could have a really important role in the future of trying to get this system applied more widely. And then lastly, just the, you know, cool, cool climates and, and heavy soils, short growing seasons, you're more likely to have challenges with, with this system because of that mulch and the, and the both nutrient and temperature related limitations. So with those in mind, I've spent a lot of time trying to think of ways to modify the system to address some of those and maybe make them better suited for, for our climate. And so we did a trial with this system here. The cover crop was planted in 2019. And last year we grew a few vegetable crops in there. And the main factors that distinguish it from the standard in situ mulch system are the, we started out with ridges or you probably could do the same thing just with a raised bed with multiple rows, but we opted for with these ridges that we formed prior to seeding our cover crop, our winter ride cover crop. And then we planted annual ryegrass down each of those ridges. And later learned that, that that's called biostriptil. It's a, it's a thing. And I think it's a pretty cool idea. And we're hoping that we'd get, not only get some kind of loosening and preparation of that planting zone, but, but that that the residue would, would winter kill and disintegrate. And we'd be left with a kind of an easier space to plant into because we don't have any real sophisticated high residue transplanting equipment. In practice, the way that it worked out for us was we have, we had a large, large family of deer spend a lot of time in this field. And they pretty much grazed off all the radish residue and kind of trampled the ridges and compacted them a little bit. So in the spring, it just, it really wasn't something that we wanted to plant directly into without some other way to, to suppress weeds. So we ended up just improvising and we applied about two or three inches of compost right down just the, just the row, just the ridgetop. And that served to both try to keep weed seeds in that, in that exposed soil from germinating and give us a loose planting medium to put our plugs into. And overall, there was, I think there's a lot of reasons to keep exploring this. There are definitely some, some things that didn't work as well as we wanted to. But I think overall, I think this idea of combining the, the deep compost system with an in situ cover crop mulch is a, could be an area that we want to explore further, particularly if you're trying to adapt this to, to direct seeded crops, because you can't really do that with, with a heavy organic residue. And then I just wanted to kind of mention, this is not something I can really speak to with experience because it's a new thing for us, but we, we did get our hands on a straw bale processor. We co-co-purchased with another farm nearby. And I kind of made this decision a little bit reluctantly because I, I've been really excited about this transfer mulch system. But there's really not a lot of off the shelf equipment that works for that. So there'd be a lot of, I think, kind of customization and modification to try to make that happen. And, and then there's just the limitations of, of needing to, to produce the biomass on site as well. And so with the straw, we can, we can purchase it in from, from another grower. If we need to, it can be stored, it can be easily transported around. And so when it comes time to plant and mulch, we, we don't have to, to also be spending some time growing the, growing the green transferred mulch. So, so I'm, I'm excited to try this in a few different ways, one of which I think it could be useful to, in a system where we'd actually transplant into a winter-killed cover crop with somewhat less residue that's easier to get into with our equipment. And then potentially applying straw on top of that after the fact, once it gets somewhat established either in the way that it's pictured in this, this photo here where it can be banded kind of in the, in between rows or it can, it can be distributed over a 25 to 40 foot wide swath and a more of a broadcast system. So no results yet, but just I wanted to kind of plant that seed as something that we're trying. And hopefully we'll have something to report on next year. All right. And then the last tactic that I wanted to go over a little bit is the use of interceding cover crops into established plantings. And we've done this primarily with peppers. So that's kind of the focus. We did get a farmer rancher grant from North Central Sare in 2019 to do a trial with this. And we've found that it really has some, some merits and we've continued to use it on our farm. And it's a good way to get cover crops growing in your field, particularly with long season crops like peppers that often don't leave enough of a window after harvest, after harvest is completed to really get a meaningful cover crop established to protect your soil over the winter. So, you know, there's, there are, this can lead to some reduced tillage for weed control. That's not really been our, our primary goal with it. But we, we found that the fruit is cleaner. It doesn't get as much soil splash. And it's easier to get into the field to harvest right after a heavy rainfall compared to muddy conditions with, with exposed soil. And so we've used this both in a plastic culture system where we just planted in the pathway and in a bare, bare, bare ground situation where we just broadcasted over the entire field. And the key to making this work is to try to minimize the competition between your cover crop and your cash crop. And we, we've had reasonable luck interceding the cover crop between plastic mulch beds right around the time of transplanting the crop. That gives you the maximum kind of ecological benefits from having that growing there and keeping the soil covered and producing biomass. But it definitely needs to be mowed regularly through the season. And I, in our experience, there's likely to be a little bit of a yield drop when you have that growing there. But I think with good nutrient management and irrigation management, it can definitely be made to work pretty well. And then, but more often we ended up just seeding it a little later, six or seven weeks after transplanting, after we've cultivated a few times, because we do have the equipment to do that, then we'll intercede the pathways and there's usually enough time for that to get established before we start harvesting. And then that late in the season and with the harvest activity and the trampling, we don't do any mowing in that, in that way. And then when we are growing it in a bare ground situation, we will just broadcast it over the whole fields, had pretty good luck six or seven weeks after transplanting. And it just grows at co-mingles with the crop. And we try to grow low, low-statured cover crops so they don't actually just kind of encroach on the crop height-wise. But seeding it that late, usually we can have good cover on the soil and it had a pretty negligible impact on yields. So it's still an experimental thing for us. We're still playing around with different cover crop mixtures that we've done mostly annual ryegrass mixed with that white clover. But we're going to try creeping red fescue this next year instead of annual ryegrass, because we've found that annual ryegrass will go to seed and it can become a carryover weed seed the following year. And we've done some other experiments with interceding. We routinely will seed our asparagus fields to either cow peas or forage soybeans after finishing harvest. So we'll do our last harvest. We'll mow it and do a shallow tillage pass and then drill a really high rate of soybeans or cow peas. And that does a good job of just kind of suppressing the weeds during the growth season after harvesting. And then we did hemp one year and and I interceded annual ryegrass. I think that was in late August or so. And so the fields ended up with a really nice cover crop going into the fall. So I guess that's, yeah, that's what I have for what we're doing on our farm and happy to have this conversation continue here. There have been a number of questions about cover crops and especially which cover crops work best for interceding pathways. Again, our experience is mostly been with annual ryegrass and Dutch white clover in a mixture. And kind of looking at the literature and and Sarah has some good good publications and they give some information about when how those have worked. And they were both recommended. And I think I was a little bit surprised when we did our trial two years ago with how quickly annual ryegrass went to seed. It was probably five or six weeks maybe after after planting. And because we're really looking for short statured cover crops that aren't going to be growing up into our crops that don't necessarily need to be either not mowed at all or not mowed very frequently. And when annual ryegrass goes to seed, it goes from maybe being six inches to being 16 inches. And and then there's a seed production issue. So I don't know that I would recommend that if you're planning to have it in for a long period of time. In the cases where we've planted it in maybe in August, at least mid August or onward, maybe it's just because of the time of year and certain like triggers that it needs for reproduction. We've had minimal to no seed production with the annual ryegrass. And it seems like a really good option for later in the season. So yeah, I know I've I don't know how it's been working, but I've seen photos from Harmony Valley Farm. And they've used creeping red fescue mixed with Dutch wet clover. And I've seen pictures of them doing it mostly for plastic culture and the pathways with with. I know I saw a picture with onions and with melons. So that's one that we want to try. But I don't know that we have I don't have the perfect recommendation. But wet clover, as long as you can control the kind of stolen, iferous habit of it seems to be a pretty pretty good option, because it stays nice and short. And, you know, it's a legume, so it shouldn't be as competitive. But it can definitely creep if you let it. Some additional points that people asked questions about for cover crops are to do with mowing, to do with the cost of cover crops and to do with the place of buckwheat. So any thoughts about any of those issues? A couple thoughts that come to those are that's a pretty general, you know, question there. But I find that a that a flail mower is the best tool for managing cover crops. You can take down a very large, tall, high biomass cover crop with it. And most importantly, it distributes the residue evenly across the field. If you use a brush, brush hog type rotary mower, you end up with kind of wind rows with with maybe more residue than you want. And then areas that are bare. So we're pretty happy with a flail mower cost. The truth is, I've never given a second thought to it. It's the economics of incorporating cover crops into high value vegetable cropping systems. As compared with agronomic crops where the margins are so, the value is so much lower. So the thought of spending however many $20, $30 an acre to seed rye is a bigger choice. So it's, I mean, it's a cost. There are certainly cover crops that are more economical. And, you know, I find oats and peas and rye are all pretty darn cheap. And you get a lot, a lot of benefit from from the seed cost. So that's, that's just my personal view that it's, it's, I've never really never considered the cost as a big, big issue. And buckwheat, we do use buckwheat. And it's, it's, it's a really, the challenge is, is you get a lot of benefit from the, from, from the pollinator standpoint, we do quite a bit of work to create and maintain pollinator habitat on our farm. It is a, it is a marvelous plant for a wide range of beneficial insects and pollinators. But if you let it flower for more than maybe five days, then you're going to start getting seed production. And so if you're, if you're using it in an actively rotated field that's going to be in a vegetable crop next, we still use it sometimes if we have a short window of time to fill between a spring and a fall double crop maybe. But I think, I think it can be a really good component if you have some kind of a pollinator strip you want to have like some annuals in there, because it'll self so very readily and it's a really valuable plant in a lot of ways. But if you're trying to grow it like in a vegetable field and you don't want it to create a problem, then I think the benefit is much less because you really can't let it flower for very long. But otherwise it can, it's a really good, it'll, it'll outcompete anything at the beginning. So it's very good if you want to just kind of have a short period of time where weeds are kept at bay. And then when you, when you mow it, it breaks down to almost nothing. There's not much biomass produced. So it's not, not, I don't think hugely beneficial from the soil health standpoint in terms of building organic matter, but it definitely has a place. Yeah, I should just clarify with regards to cover crops and profitability and expenses and stuff. We're in a lucky position to have land, you know, we're operating on a larger farm that my extended family owns. And so we started out with, with 14 acres and we were able to add eight and then we added another 10. So we're, we're kind of building in the ability to, to actually take full, you know, a full year to put it into cover crop specifically for, for kind of soil, soil building purposes. I was mainly referring to the use of a cover crop, you know, before, between or after a cash crop within a year where, you know, potentially a double, double cash crop can be pulled off in those circumstances, but more talking about like, you know, we finish harvesting winter squash on September 15th, like is it worth, you know, spending 30 or 40 bucks an acre on rye to get that growing into the fall? If there's no other cash crop to put in, in my view, it's, you know, it's an easy yes. But for sure, for folks that are more land, land limited, or really are facing a real choice between planting a cover crop or planting a short-term cash crop, then yeah, there's maybe more of a more nuance to the decision at that point. Dana, I was curious about the kind of seed bed you had after your, I think it was oil seed radish in the ridges. How was planting into that? Well, I mean, I didn't really get to see what planting into the oil seed radish residue was like. Yeah, because the, because the residue doll disappeared into deer's bellies and then, and they kind of just got, got trampled. There's hoof prints and they were like eroded and stuff. So we have a deer fence now. We actually were able to build a deer fence last fall, which is amazing. And so I think I'd like to try it again. So yeah, we ended up having to use that kind of compost technique as a, as a workaround. But yeah, there's been some, some pretty cool work done on using winter killed oil seed radish, tillage radish for spring planted direct seed crops, like spinach and beets and other things. So I think there's some evidence that that can can be a good strategy to plant straight into that with, with pretty basic equipment, with just like a double disc opener on a seed or something. So we haven't tried that, that system exactly ourselves, but hoping to, hoping to try it more in the future. Yeah, I'll pose first post the last question to all of you. What do each of the presenters see as the next stage for research and development in no till or put another way? What are the big obstacles and questions that need to be solved with this production system? I'll admit that when, when I first heard about the work that, that Jan and Johannes and the rest of their team were doing with this transferred mulch system and this mulch cut transplant, I was like, they figured it out. Like, that just, it seemed, it seemed like that was like the missing link. And I've spent so much time trying to think about these dealing with, you know, just the mechanics of planting through mulches. So from, from a technical standpoint, so I think that that, I mean, I think that that could be a big part of, of making this system work. I think there are a lot of these just issues with, with, with nutrient management and with soil temperature. And, you know, if you, if you look at the, the, the research that's been done and, and on farm trials that have been done over the last, you know, 10, 10, 15 years in these rolled cover crop systems that, you know, the results are kind of across the board. And until we can start to minimize that variability and, and identify what exactly are the causes of those, you know, yield, yield declines in a given environment. I think that that's, that's a pretty broad thing. That's, you know, that's what I hoped I would help figure out when I did my, you know, my master's program. And I didn't, didn't quite crack that nut, but I just think if it's going to be adopted on a wide scale, it needs to just be reliable. And, you know, most farmers that are using it are, are still kind of experimenters in there in that way. So that's, that's my thought.