 My name is Will Stevens. I live in Shoreham, Vermont. My wife Judy and I farm a golden russet farm. It's an 82-acre farm with 10 to 12 acres of vegetables in any given year in the balance and hay and pasture. We sell wholesale retail at the farmer's market in Middlebury. We have a CSA and a farm stand here as well. I like using cover crops because I feel as though the ground should be green as opposed to brown. When we first started farming, to me a beautiful field was a clean field, brown, cultivated, tidy. Over the years I've come to feel as though a healthy field is a field that's green as much as possible. Some of the reasons I like cover cropping are nutrient uptake in the fall with my grass crops, my wheat. It'll mop up any nitrogen that might be left over after the vegetable crop. With the legumes I'm hoping to fix nitrogen as a nutrient source and erosion control will be the third reason. Hold the soil during the winter. This is a field of winter wheat that followed a corn crop last year. We planted it in September. We have a clay loam soil here which is one reason I grow wheat. In the springtime when it gets quite wet we don't have a great window of opportunity to plow it under. Rye would go to stock a lot quicker than wheat at least two weeks earlier than wheat and wheat stays shorter and more leafy. So that helps me in my management, especially in a wet spring because I can plow it down and still end up with a nice seed bed without having to mow it and then plow it. One of the things to be aware of when growing wheat though is that it is an alternate host to thrips, onion thrips, which in our case is becoming a big problem. Another option I'm trying with wheat is to rest the field entirely the second season and the way I'm doing that is to frost seed clover. This clover was frost seeded in April last year. I then went in in June and mowed the wheat off to release the clover seedlings and then let it go all season, let the clover grow and I'll let it go again this season before plowing it in next year for vegetable crop. Some of the advantages I hope to see coming from this fallow system are nitrogen fixation with the clover here, weed suppression and better tilth and soil health. One of the things I like about putting legumes in my rotation is that I need the nitrogen source. The supply of manure that we've had in the past is drying up as ag economics change and so I'm going to need to find alternatives. Another way I'm working legumes into my rotation is using hairy vetch. This was a field of winter squash last year that I overseeded the hairy vetch on the 4th of July last year and then rotary hoded in and then it was dry then so I irrigated that in. The vetch is able to live under in the shade throughout the summer as the squash vines over it. Then at harvest time we just come in, we harvest, frost takes the squash out, the vetch continues to grow in a typical fall for a couple months way into November in some years. So now it's the end of May, about 10 months have gone by. It's not quite butted up yet but I'm ready to use the field so I'll be plowing this down. Traditionally organic systems have recommended 50% of your acreage into vegetable production and 50% out of production in any given year. If I can do 40% as a cover crop fallow and 60% vegetables that'll be good for me.