 The purpose of the grant that I applied for here was going to a lot of cover crop meetings. You'll hear about using the roller crimper as kind of an herbicide-free method of weed control, which is definitely appealing to folks who are organic, or even in our area where most folks still use herbicides. It gives you an herbicide-free method to maybe kind of break up some of those cycles and maybe help stem the tide of herbicide resistance in weeds just by giving them kind of some of that downtime. So that was kind of the purpose of the grant. And also to look at how the roller crimper, where most of the studies show it being used in just nice square plots. In our area, we have a lot of hilly ground, terraces, irregularly shaped fields. And I just wanted to see, well, how does that change how you operate the roller crimper, how you approach planting the field, and what are some of the management considerations you need to consider. So the roller crimper, for anyone who's not familiar with it, you can either make your own by getting plants from the Rodale Institute. I, for mine, bought it from INJ Manufacturing out of Pennsylvania. It's just kind of a steel drum with these chevron-shaped metal edges on it so that as it turns through the field, it applies all the pressure to that one point where the metal chevron edges make contact with the plant. So it rolls over the plant, and then that metal edge crimps it to help terminate the plant, which in the case of this study was mostly cereal rye. You can also add water to the roller crimper to add a little extra weight. And for this study, I did it, used the roller crimper for planting and terminating your cover crop simultaneously. You can also find setups where you can pull it behind the tractor, maybe if you're doing more like in an orchard setting or something like that. For this study, it was a 15 and a half foot roller because that matched up perfectly with the 15-foot drill or the 15-foot six-row corn planter that we had. And it's about 2,400 pounds when it's empty, but when you get it completely filled with water, it's 3,560 pounds. I didn't add nearly that much water to it because even by itself it seemed to have quite a bit of weight that it added to the front end of the tractor. So I think I may be filled about a quarter full. And for finding a front three-point hitch for your tractor if you decide to go with doing the rolling crimping while planting method, those are some different sources of a front three-point hitch. I used one from LeForge. If I remember right, I think when I bought it, it was close to $4,000 for the front three-point hitch and I think it was even from a place that they were kind of looking to get some sold. So I'm not sure what the prices would be now. On the roller crimper, when I purchased it at the time, it was just a little bit over $4,000. I don't know if the price would have changed, but there are other sources of three-point hitches and you can also even look on places like auction websites, might be able to find someone who has one that they're willing to sell or even if you have something like a front end loader, might be able to find someone who's pretty good at welding and make kind of a custom thing to work with something that would attach to a three-point hitch. When setting up the hitch on the tractor, at least with this LeForge model, the way it was set up is you'd fold your arms down, you could keep them locked up when you're not using it, but there is a pins that would allow the arms to either lock in place either firmly or you could set the pin that gave the arms a little bit more give and that's how I set it up for the project because I figured by having a little bit of that sway in the arms it helped the roller crimper adjust to any variations in the terrain rather than relying solely on the flotation from the hydraulics which might be just a little bit slow to get things to float so that it's pressing down against the ground firmly. So here's an example of using the roller crimper in the field. This would have been done in 2013, kind of around May 25th I think and it's in the cereal rye planting corn and this was probably one of the best examples of rolling and crimping while planting. The rye was really lush and tall and green because it had gotten some, was inadvertently fertilized when we had some, the local fertilizer dealer fertilizing for wheat fields they thought it was wheat and applied it to that so we had originally intended on harvesting the rye for seed but everyone I'd heard said, oh no it's going to get really rank and it's going to fall over so we thought well where it already had some at fertility let's try corn on it and see how we get along with it. So one of the big considerations when you're using the roller crimper is when should you do it because that's probably the biggest variable that it throws in that it may be a good time to plant but it may not be a good time to roll and crimp. So if you're using cereal rye which is one of the more typical cover crops you'll be doing if you're rolling and crimping it needs to at least be at pollination stage which is kind of what it shows right there in the picture you see those little yellow flowers kind of dangling from it but a lot of studies that have been done at universities show that if you wait even longer into its life cycle let it hit like the milk or dough stage where you can tell the seeds being set on but if it's not quite mature enough yet you get even better control and you really can't pinpoint a specific date where rolling and crimping is going to work well because in the first year when I did this study it was a cool spring and a typical time when we thought rye or wheat would be starting to get boot stage and be heading out it was much more delayed and so thus it delayed our soybean planting as well in order to hit that right stage for terminating the rye using the roller crimper when operating I just operated the tractor like I normally would speed wise just about four or four and a half miles per hour but the big difference is not turning sharply while using the roller crimper when we first got it before even trying it out in the field with the crop well you know see how it runs just run over some corn stalks and see how it flattens it and when I tried to turn where we had just you know some gentle curves in the field you'd notice those arms starting to bend a little bit the metal kind of had some spring in it so once you lift the roller crimper back up they'd spring back into place but I didn't really want to risk breaking those arms of a three-point hitch because that'd be a pretty expensive mistake and so decided that if you can keep your passes straight the better and so if you had fields say like in this example where the one on the right that's you know just a very gentle curve you can follow the general trajectory of it just fine but something like here where maybe we would take that curve with the planter if we weren't using the roller crimper with that on the front you couldn't even make a curve like that typically what happens is you turn your tires on the tractor and the roller crimper kind of just keeps pushing forward slightly and you can tell the tractors it's almost like if you have when you're running like a bucket or something on the front end of a tractor and you really can't just steer with the ground so one of the considerations when on terrace ground when using the roller crimper is when you go up and over the terraces and this is an example where we have a waterway with some berms along the side to help feed water into the waterway you can tell had pretty decent flattening along the edges but then like a pass like this where it flattened it there but then when it went up and over the terrace you have some rye that didn't get flattened because as that roller crimper approaches the terrace it stays, maintains contact with the ground but then once it goes up and over the flotation and even the give and the arms doesn't allow it to reach back down to the ground in time in order to flatten it on that pass so the way I approached that was say you did all your passes around the field I tried to just do all the passes going the same direction then once you'd reach those areas where the roller crimper had gone up and over the terrace and hadn't quite flattened your cover crop I just on successive passes in the field I just keep going straight to then flatten it going from a different direction and that seemed to fix it pretty well another consideration is when you have fields where you know especially when you have years with heavy rain have just some little small ditches it doesn't even have to be very large maybe just an inch or two deep that can also have an effect on how well the roller crimper controls your cover crop because on the sides you can tell it made good contact with the ground and flattened the rye on both sides but right there in the middle is where some water didn't run into the waterway and instead ran along the side and if you were to walk out there you wouldn't notice much of a difference in terrain but since that roller crimper, those chevron shaped blades weren't making contact with the base of the stem it was just kind of like taking your arm and just walking and just letting the plants bend over but then they'd spring back up so it didn't flatten and crimp the plant it just kind of gently rolled over it without actually pressing it against the ground and that's really important in getting good control with the roller crimper another thing you can encounter on some of those irregularly shaped fields where you have different changes in elevation is when you're say on the side of the hill of a field I found that the roller crimper had a tendency to want to drag the tractor sideways and downhill if you're going along the side and the best solution I found to that was depending on how the field laid just kind of let the roller crimper guide the tractor where you want to go and as long as you're pretty close on the trajectory of how you want your past to go just let it continue but say if you're getting a little bit too far off course you can just pick it up and just go the following direction you want to do after that so say if it was going around a curve and you're starting to get drug downhill farther than you want to just pick up and instead of it being a curve make it just kind of a obtuse angle a little bit so for approaching straight terraces with the roller crimper I actually had pretty darn good luck with it I was really impressed with how well it worked on straight laying terraces the only thing you need to change on when approaching those terraces is say if typically where maybe you would just put your left side of the planter going one way to plant the ridge and the right side when you're going the other way to plant the other part of the ridge instead in order to get the roller crimper where it was 15 and a half feet and didn't make solid contact with the curvature of that terrace I'd have to make one pass along the top in order to get that top batch of rye from that point could see what rye did not get rolled in crimp then you'd make another pass to the edge of that to crimp what was after that first pass and then finally for the rest of the terrace and make passes to the sides of that so what typically on a terrace might be considered say four passes to fully cover it instead for me it took five passes that extra pass at the top to get what the roller crimper couldn't quite reach and this is just kind of a closer look at that side by side there the day when I was doing that during that year it was had a lot of rainy spells and this was kind of one of the few windows that we had where we could get planted and have decent enough soil conditions to get things planted but it even did brew up a little bit of a sprinkle that day but you can see how everything was flattened really nicely on that part and then see that was June 13 so then nine days later we'll see a few spots where there's some green rye standing and some of it that didn't get quite rolled and crimped would maybe spring back up but you could tell that the roller crimper kind of chewed it up a little and I think that it probably given the full length of the season probably would have just kind of laid over just with enough rain and wind over time now for curved terraces they were a little bit more complicated the way I approached them was pass one staying at the top of the terrace and making a straight shot and then just going down into the terrace channel on the other side doing the same thing from the other side of that terrace just along the top and down into the channel and then make passes along the side kind of going up and over the terrace after that pass or even once you'd get to the curve there once you knew you were done with your pass just kind of stopping raising up the drill or the planter raising up the roller crimper and going to another spot because with that curve since the arms of the roller crimper or of the three point hitch rather don't let you adjust to the curve you can't just plant along that entire terrace that you normally would and you'd also have to watch out for the terrace outlets where you don't want to get too close with those and roll your roller crimper over your terrace outlets so there was a little bit that I leave behind but typically around outlets you'll still have some weed escapes anyway so if it's not going to be rye it's probably going to be something like water hint there anyway now one thing that really stuck out to me when doing the roller crimper was the importance of fertility this is where we'd graze some cattle on some cereal rye planted into corn or after corn and you could see where you know they left manure and urine and you had your greener spots there when it came time to roll and crimp that those spots that were greener from the cattle they did a much better job of flattening than the rest of the field because it didn't get any supplemental nitrogen to feed the rye that year that we did it and this is pretty consistent with I think a study out of it was either out of the University of Virginia or it was one of the Virginia Soil Water Conservation District maybe in partnership that they stress the importance of fertility particularly nitrogen in order to get a nice lush stand of rye because having that kind of lush green growth is what helps make it flatten it's almost in the same principle is when you have say corn that took up a lot of nitrogen and it lodges more easily it's kind of almost the same thing that you're shooting for with the cereal rye you're wanting to intentionally make it want to lodge flatten and stay pressed to the ground and going back to fertility if you have fields with some thinner ground I ran into that where if you had a poor stand it resulted in less biomass which means less mulch and the rye stins in those areas when they seemed to lack fertility they were just a lot tougher stinnier kind of more lignatious and they just would have a tendency to just want to spring back up rather than get crushed by the crimper and flatten so this was also in 2013 planting soybeans using a 15 foot drill 7.5 inch row spacing into cereal rye that rye didn't receive any supplemental nitrogen it would have gotten kind of a typical NPK that we would have done before soybeans that is kind of at the edge of the field where it is a little thinner and you can see some stems that are still standing at the edge but for the most part a lot of the rye did a really good job of flattening in that instance the question was would more weight in the crimper have helped it might have I almost put more emphasis on the fertility having a good thick stand that is really lush I think that is the biggest factor if I did add some more weight it might have the one thing that made me a little bit risky of just filling it full as when you would lift up that roller crimper it would make the tires squat pretty well on the tractor and I didn't really want to just be driving on the road all the time with the tires squatting down like that and it may have been fine but that is somewhere it may have helped but I think the fertility is probably the biggest factor so in 2013 part of the study with the roller crimper was trying it on both a cover crop mix and then the field that you saw in that video at the beginning of cereal rye the cover crop mix was about 15 pounds per acre of rye 8 pounds per acre of vetch 5 pounds per acre of Austrian winter peas I think 3 pounds per acre of crimson clover and a pound each of purple top turnips and canola and the cereal rye was about 50 pounds per acre following soybeans the mix had a fertilizer blend applied to it and that's the only source of fertility it ever had before the season or even during the season for the corn and the cereal rye had about 80 pounds per acre intended for wheat but it received it instead and when we planted that year about a couple days later we received really heavy rains, cooler temperatures and anyone whether it was till, conventional till or cover crop had to replant after that rain however in this instance where we had all that cover crop biomass serving as mulch to hold that water in a replant really didn't seem very feasible because I think we would have just mudded up the field trying to get things replanted because it still would have been really wet underneath all that cover crop straw so in the mix it ended up being about 49 bushels per acre for corn and in the cereal rye it was 21 bushels per acre not very good yield and here's the corn in the mix and you can see there it just had a lot that really didn't roll and crimp at all and I think part of that was it was our first year of doing cover crops and we thought we're going to have this mix of legumes and the rye and we're going to get our nitrogen fertility from the legumes but it was trying to think we could fully supplement our nitrogen way too soon and having that rye it still had some of the issues where it just needed a little bit of fertility boost in order to get to the height that it would roll and crimp well the other issue is on the cover crop mixes which we do really like using it didn't work so well with the roller crimper because certain plants like the canola and the turnips and other universities have kind of noticed this too is that when you roll over the canola say something like canola or some of the other brassicas with the roller crimper it has a more rubbery stem so what either happens is it'll just kind of bend over and then pop back up or it'll just snap in half and then it'll probably just kind of bolt back from that point and just try to keep growing and it doesn't like oats or rye wheat or tritocately it doesn't have that tendency to flatten and get crimped and stay down and that was the corn in the mix June 21st so almost a month later and it was still pretty darn short but it didn't receive aside from that about 12 pounds of nitrogen in the fall that's all it had received because at this point we really weren't interested in trying to supplement it with more the corn and the rye the rye crimped beautifully on that plot and it had a lot of biomass but again, given the year where you had that layer of straw seed that had just been planted in the ground and then that heavy rain I think things really just basically drowned out and so that's how basically it was through the year you'd have spots where you'd have corn that came up in a few of the better areas where maybe it was dry enough to gain a foothold but most of it just it was just way too wet the corn but again I wouldn't really pin that on the roller crimper or cover crops it's just, that's kind of how the weather lined up and about the only thing that did have an effect is that where some folks maybe would have been able to get back in and replant we weren't able to soybeans 2013 that was from one of those videos earlier the cereal rye was put on at 60 pounds per acre and that's what it looked like about nine days eight, nine days later after they were planted you had some beans coming through I'd been asked a question before if maybe bumping up my population on the soybeans would have helped and it might have, because you can see some skips in there I think as the time went on you could see that more beans would be catching up but that was about nine days later and you can see that really most of the rye is sufficiently terminated and the beans are coming up but not all the weeds were terminated from that mulch you can see there that's a mare's tail and you have the base of the stem and where it was laid underneath that rye mulch it just kind of made a kink in there and then found a spot to start growing back up through it having a heavier seeding rate that might have helped because I was using more of the seeding rate that we would typically use if we were spraying with herbicides I think doing with the roller crimper having a heavier seeding rate maybe shooting for a hundred plus pounds per acre I think it would have been interesting to see at least if that would have resulted in a much thicker stand of rye that could have better out-competed the mare's tail from the get-go so we did have to spray that in order to control for some of those weeds and this is just another example of the same thing going on this is where we use the roller crimper in a garden it was some prickly lettuce that you can see the entire base of the stem where it was laid under that rye and once it found an opening made a little kink and then popped right up through an opening in the mulch so some weeds do have a little bit of a work around for that mulch but that's the soybeans on the field that that was planted to that would have been I did do a second spraying on that where these are being raised for seed beans and they kind of do like if you can eliminate as much weed pressure as you can but I think really just that one single spraying would have been enough under most circumstances so the one benefit of using the roller crimpers we were able to eliminate a pre-emergence pass of herbicides so in that field the rolled crimped area was just a little bit over 29 bushels per acre in the same field there was an adjacent area that was a little bit over 36 bushels per acre and I think part of that would be just due to the variety because another field in that same part of the country just about is a quarter mile away where we had some cereal rye averaged 50 bushels per acre following cereal rye that was just terminated chemically so the rye that was rolled and crimped and this kind of gets to your question Mike about when like terminating your rye when it's a little bit later on in its growth stage and this was at the time seemed kind of like doe stage or pretty darn close to around that range and come August went out in the field and noticed there was plenty of volunteer rye coming up so I was not going to give us any trouble come harvest time it didn't bother us any and actually had a pretty decent stand of rye ready to go so I thought well what do I want to do with that volunteer rye for the next year I mean did a great job of holding things in place so really it turned out great so I thought well maybe where we do grow our own cereal rye for seed to kind of help keep our cover crop costs low well maybe we can it's already there it's been growing longer than any other rye we've planted maybe we'll just harvest it for seed and so we fertilized part of it the other I thought well maybe there's some residual nitrogen left over from the soybeans maybe won't have to fertilize that and after harvest there were some patchy spots where we just spotted in some rye yield wise it was a lot less than what we had the year past so if you ever do rolling crimp and you do get a volunteer stand of cereal rye I wouldn't encourage trying to use it as a seed crop the following year but I think it would make awesome grazing so you know it's almost kind of just like a self-receding crop which really is makes it pretty economical so in 2014 did the same thing soybeans planted in the cereal rye they were non-GMO beans and the roller crimper that was the field that the cows had grazed on there was some rye that flattened pretty well some that didn't I think also being a little bit earlier on where I was just a little bit past the pollination stage you know we ended up having to spray the one benefit is that after we planted that field we had about I think it was four tints of rain I guess and so being non-GMO beans you thought well we needed to get it sprayed before they're up because we won't really have many options then and we were able to get in just I think a couple days later after they'd been planted and having all that rye mulch out there did make that rescue spray much more forgiving because under typical conditions it would have been flipping up mud on the tires and just making a mess whereas instead once I pulled out of the field I really you really couldn't have told that I'd sprayed in somewhere that was at wet thanks and it was harvested on October 28th and it was 53 and a half bushels per acre which was pretty comparable to other fields on the farm that had also been put in cereal rye with beans and you can just see there the beans emerging through the rye straw in that field and again maybe with using the roller crimper you can see some skips there perhaps bumping up the seeding rate a little bit to accommodate for all that excess mulch might be a good thing to keep in mind if you want to do use the roller crimper and then aside from the project just having the roller crimper I kind of wanted to try it out in a garden setting because we had some folks around the area where maybe they grow pumpkins or squash things like that looking at that as a way of providing a mulch for that so that was a rolling crimp June 15th it was a mix of cereal rye and hairy vetch I don't know what the seeding rate is because I basically took a five gallon bucket of each and just started flinging it around the garden so it may be something like a thousand pounds per acre it was pretty ridiculous I'm still getting hairy vetch coming up there now but you can see there the rye it did a pretty decent job with fertility being a garden we'd all really put plenty of manure and composted it so it had all it really needed fertility wise but the vetch you can see it there and it really did not roll and crimp it and that's pretty consistent with from the emu extension I think down at the Bradford research farm I've heard them talk about trying to roll and crimp vetch and I think they basically said it can be done but you have to go at it from one angle then another maybe a third pass after that I mean you just have to beat it up in order to get vetch to finally just stay down from the roller crimper so perhaps if you are interested in vetch mowing might be a better option for that but we went ahead and planted some squash we had some just some summer squash plants that were extra from where mom had her garden so put that in there and you can even see some of the rye that I don't know if it's rye rolled and crimped and came back up or if it's just some of the extra of that ungodly high seeding rate that just had not germinated but the vetch it still was in good shape and it set on pods and everything so that's just kind of another thing to illustrate how on the mixes I thought well the vetch is going to trellis up the rye the rye will flatten it and it will also terminate the vetch and that didn't seem to be the case with how it went if the vetch were a little bit more on its seeding rate it might have worked a little bit better so just some main takeaways I think from the grant is just kind of some practical tips is don't turn too sharply with a roller crimper because it won't let you turn sharply anyway and just in the interest of protecting the investment that you've made into the crimper and the front three point hitch if you're using that I was talking to an NRCS agent from you know just a few miles south of us just a roller crimper that was a pull type and he was able to turn through the field with it fine he can't do everything just in one pass with the crimping and the planting simultaneously but having one where you just you know hook it up to the back into your tractor he had no problem with that the only issue he ran into is when he was going along a terrace the edges of those chevron blades on the roller crimper seemed to want to dig into the dirt a little bit and cause him some issues so both both the front mounted or the rear mounted have some pros and cons and just like any experiment you do you know start small pick some easy laying fields it just makes it a lot easier to kind of get adjusted to it soybeans and rye is the easiest for using the roller crimper you know we've tried doing a lot with cover crops before corn and you know I've seen folks have success with doing rye before corn but I think just all that mulch and the nitrogen tie up and some of what they talk about the allelopathic effect of the rye I think that did cause some trouble for the corn if you fertilize your cover crop whether if you're conventional just using you know map or dap urea or in organic settings with like compost manure or just starting with a really high fertility field in and of itself makes for a better mulch straight terraces easier to roll in crimp than curved ones and having even level terrain like the example where there was just that small little divot in the field that was all it took in order to make the terrain uneven enough that it did not roll in crimp the rye on one of those passes weather delays that's just the other thing which is true in any kind of situation of farming but with the roller crimper where it adds two levels like an extra level of planning for when you're planting say if you have say it's the end of May like May 20th or something and it'd be perfect conditions for planting soybeans it's good and dry out there but maybe that the rye you have out in the field hasn't hit anthesis so you can't roll in crimp it or at least rely on adequate control so what do you want to plan for it then are you going to maybe mow the rye instead or spray it it just adds another layer where you may have planned to roll in crimp and plant your crop but the weather dictated otherwise be prepared for volunteer cover crops like in that example and you know figure out a way how you want to utilize them whether it be grazing haying and having that extra residue if anything else by managing it with the roller crimper in mind letting that rye get really tall having that extra residue kind of gives a nice cushion if you do have to end up and go in and spray due to rain concerns it did make that much more forgiving and those are just some books that I kind of like reading about on the cover crops and just kind of farming ecology stuff in general so and a couple of those are actually SARE books that managing cover crops profitably and building soils for better crops you can get those free on their website and they've been kind of like my cover crop soil health Bibles if I'm ever just like sitting in the tractor when harvest time running the auger wagon waiting for dad to come around I'll just pull out my phone and start reading and it's their great resources yeah the question was is do I see more success with kind of softer or more solid ground and I really can't say I'd seen any difference much one way or the other like that year when we planted the field if we were just going into its typical no till conditions I wouldn't have planted then because it was still pretty tacky enough that I think we would run into some issues running it with having all that extra biomass on top allowed me to get through the field whether for better or for ill if I would have been better off holding off for a little bit in order to plant if I was maybe getting a little bit you know trying to jump the gun a little bit but I don't think I've really noticed anything as far as the firmness of the ground I haven't really had a year where we've tried it where we've just been like bone dry to see how that would affect it so I'm not a hundred percent sure on that like the softness of the ground having any effect the question was if I've ever purposely crimped it later rather than earlier and I'll actually even get to that in a little bit on like kind of waiting later into the dough stage or even where it's almost sitting on seed and typically I've always shot for like the milk or dough stage there was one year when it was a second year of the project in 2014 when I was doing it more around the anthesis stage and I think that did result in a little bit lower control just because your whole field of rise isn't going to mature especially where we were using just variety not stated seed you know you'd have some plants that were sitting on flowers some that were just kind of into boot stage and that makes managing that a lot more complicated when some rise ready but some's not and the fertility also plays a role into that some of those like in the picture with the the cow patties it was much farther along in its growth stage than some of those thinner spots so the more even the field can be in terms of rye maturity in terms of fertility all those factors that I think makes a huge influence on the success of the roller crimper the question was grazing the field all at once rather than strip grazing how that would affect it and I think that makes a lot of sense like on ours the way we have our field set up where we've grazed them in the past where we would just run our cattle on corn stalks those cattle had not been strip grazed on it we basically just turned them out onto where we had some hay ground after we had our second cutting of hay so they could eat on stockpiled fescue clover things like that and then we would go back to the corn fields with some of that young rye because even at kind of that early stage we do think we've seen a benefit in terms of utilizing the corn stalks better but if you were to say spring graze them I could see where that would definitely play a role if say it were strip grazing you'd have some parts that were a little bit farther along in their maturity bouncing back from that than others so the question was from the grant have I concluded this is a system and for conventional farmers like for us I haven't really used it as much since then just because it doesn't seem to fit in as well where we do spray the rye for our typical means of control anyway for organic I could see it especially like if you have it for like in an orchard setting I could definitely see it being valuable for getting some mulch to maybe transplant into if you know if that would be feasible I'm not really familiar with that but I would say that it's a useful tool to keep in your toolbox because I think it does provide some benefits over just say mowing it because that's one of the goals of the roller crimper is that instead of like say if you ran like a bush hog over it and it would just chew up all that rye or whatever you have planted out there and break it into tinier bits so it doesn't preserve your residue as long so having that roller crimper keeps in mind trying to maintain the entire plant so it doesn't break down nearly as fast which that was like this year we planted a lot more hairy vetch on some ground that we had and it was a bit of a challenge to plan into without even worrying about the roller crimper but I think say if we took maybe a sickle bar mower or something and you know I don't know if let it dry out if then would have been able to plant into it pretty well or not but I guess I kind of view it as just having one more option at your disposal and like for that 15 and a half foot one I guess it's about $4200 I think which you know that is a bit of investment but on the other hand it's capital you have on hand versus you'll certainly spend that much on herbicides in a year or so and then you know using it it's gone so that is one thing I find pretty appealing about the roller crimper is that you know it gives you cover crop or weed control and you can keep using it year after year instead of it just kind of being a one and done type thing for us I mean I from our experience I'm not sure if I could say that with absolute certainty the one thing like when we were looking for a roller crimper we actually did find one online used and it was from I think a guy who was looking to go organic out in Ohio and we asked him hey how did you get along with and he's like it did a great job at the beginning but later in the season he did encounter some weed pressure so he really wasn't looking to stick with it you know from our you know depending on what the threshold that would be acceptable for weeds you know I don't know how well it would be for that and some other things we even try aside from the roller crimper is like what they'll call like relay cropping you know planting the beans into the standing rye and had pretty good luck with that still did have to do a spray on it because you know you had plenty of soybeans out there but also mares tail, fox tail, things like that that were also fouling it up so you know I I could see where it would work if given the right conditions but I think if someone does go into it thinking first year of cover crops and I'm going to you know plant the rye and roll it and crimp it and it's going to provide a perfectly clean field season long I don't think it would be you could rely on it just for that unless the season lined up in such a way that it would