 This is a weird title for skip row planting techniques, but kind of basically, I'll just go through it here. What we were looking for is we've got a cattle and sheep operation and a little bit of row crop. And what we've been doing for several years now is we've been harvesting our corn with our livestock, not with a machine. Grazing it off, standing. We grow the corn for grain, but we simply moved our feedlot to the field is what we're doing. With lambs it works really, really good. And the idea with the whole point was to develop a cover crop understory to complement the grain. And it goes back to an idea that I'd heard somewhere a long time ago and I'd got the information about three years ago. There was some information that said that everything else being equal, the outside row corn will out yield the rest of the field significantly because it's got more light. So the idea with the skip row part is that we just simply take a six row corn planter. We put corn in row one, three, four and six. It turns the whole field into two rows of corn in the skip. And so that's what we were doing was trying to figure out what to do this. And Rich Horman, our extension agronomist, I owe him a bunch of thanks for this because he's the guy who keeps me going in the right direction. I go this way. And he figured out to do it right. And anyway, the idea was just simply to find out with the extra light, what can we grow, what different species. And we were changing the population of the corn also to see if we could get yield to be a little bit better. But that's just kind of the premise that we started with. The procedures that we did basically, we've been trying different times to oversee the cover crops. And I can tell you this much, I've successfully been thrown out of the crop insurance program because if you tell them you over seeded cover crops too early in the season, you're out. Don't do that, okay? And what we did was we had seeded at different times. We were using different populations as you say we went down through here. It was 26,000 plant populations. It used to be standard for our area. It's now a lot closer to 30,000, but we just chose that population to work with. And we tried it with a lower population to see if fewer plants we could get more stuff growing in our understory. And that's what we're doing. The things that we were measuring was the corn yield to see how much difference there really was. The dry matter response, broadcasting, timing. We did it at basically, our different seeding times was that we had seeded it at a side rest application time when corn was, I think Rich calls it V10, which is to me here. About what you can get through with the high-clinic spreader. We did that and then again it basically tasseling and silking time because our situation is we don't harvest the grain. So we don't open that field up and get all that sunlight to a cover crop late in the fall and cause them to jump. That really helps. That's kind of one of our challenges. So we was trying to get it started earlier to get more to grow. And then Rich, being the good guy he likes to do, he wanted to make sure to see how much seed got on the ground. We knew how much we were spreading, so we measured all those different things. It was just simply, it was like three-quarter acre plots. That's what it was, five different replications of each one of them. It was a 15 acre field, but Rich had flags sticking everywhere. And the different populations that we did was the 26,000, all six rows planted. And when I say the 26,000, that means the population in the row, not for the whole place if there's a skip. So there was a 20,000 and a 26,000 solid stand, all six rows. There was a 32,000 and a 26,000 skip row population is the way it works. The first year was a conventional program where we worked the ground. We planted on April 13th. We used a roundup ready corn variety thinking we did not want to have any residual chemicals for the cover crops, which was a good idea except for the fact that we needed residual cover crop, residual weed control. The different species that we used the first year were the radishes, cereal rye, oats, this Winterford turnip kale hybrid, and field peas, which are your cow peas, whichever way you look at them. We threw all those and those were the rates that we put out. Those are light. We figured out after the first year that that wasn't heavy enough. And that's the rates we put on. And over on the right-hand column, you're going to see the cost. Please don't get upset about that. We're working on figuring out how to get that down. We had to start somewhere and those were the numbers and that's what it was. It's a lot of money, but we're figuring out ways to get down quite a bit less than that now. The two things that we're checking off as far as trying to find out, getting the seed down onto the soil, was you would think that the plant population, those higher plant populations, better chance for stuff getting hung up in the leaves, not getting to the ground. And if you got the wide spacing on a skip row, you'll get better germination, you'd think, right? Well, that's one of those answers we got. We figured out it didn't work that way. Rich, we made a bunch of sticky trays or paper trays that would fit just right between a 30-inch row. And this is one of those where Rich figured this out statistically. We had 200 trays. They were scattered everywhere. We got tired of picking them up, but anyhow, that's the thing that we found out, but we had enough trays to check it that there wasn't any difference as far as the seed getting to the ground on populations versus skip rows. It was like, that ain't right, but it was. That's the way it worked out. This slide here, over on the far right, that would be the number of, the target would be the total number of seeds that we threw. And if you'll follow the lines down back to the left in the different populations, that was how many got to the ground, okay? And so the only one that really was messed up was the cereal rye. For some reason, that one, as a seed, wound up with quite a bit more of it getting hung up in the leaves. Anything else, pretty well flew around, get to ground. This one basically, when we harvested it, the first year we harvested with the combine, where we took one into the field and we harvested that particular area and used a way wagon to get the difference in the yields. 2010 for us, those are the, we were basically, that year, as far as it was relatively wet, and you kind of got the differences in the yield, there wasn't a lot of, according to statistics, there wasn't a lot of variation in the yields between the different plots, which is, if you look at a skip row, in theory, the best it can be is two thirds of the yield of the solid stand, because you only got four out of six rows planted. Well, that's how close it gets. It gets above 85%. It's not 66%, it's a lot closer to 85%. And that's, it's compensating, you get the light, it works. This is the way that we measured the biomass so we could get growing in between the rows as far as cover crops. We measured weeds and cover crops. The first year, I'll show you this one after that, it was like, we had a lot of biomass. Very little it was usable, because we didn't have anything as far as residual control. We had a tremendous cover crop of, I think it was water hemp, I'm not a weed expert, but we had a lot of stuff, but it wasn't any good. This slide here basically, it gives you on a total pounds per acre of the yield of everything. It's like the corn, it's 51, 71. And the green bar is all the biomass. And the little red bar is the cover crops. The rich sorted them out and we aired right them, but that's the pounds per acre. So we didn't have that much. We had very little of what we were really after as far as the cover crops. That's what we needed. The cover crops that we're after, we're trying to come up with a lush, a green, high protein crop that's got a fair amount of calcium to it to balance up the corn. Because corn's got a lot of phosphorus. And you got to be careful about your mineral imbalances, especially in the feedlot with lambs. You'll get urinary calculate. I don't get it in the pasture and out in the field. As soon as I go to the feedlot, we get it. It's an issue. But this is the way it worked out in 2010. 2011, we changed things a little bit. We ended up planting later because the first time we planted it, we had to do it over. That year, we split our cover crops that we applied. Some of them we applied at the side-dress with the John Deere high-clearance sprayer. Drybox spreader to spread everything with. We side-dressed the nitrogen. We added the cow peas and the radish then. And then later on in August, it was basically seeding. A friend of mine has an old John Deere high-crop liquid sprayer. Three-point kind. It's really fun to ride around the field when you hit an itch. You're trying to figure out how to jump. We just put a spinner seeder on top of it. And that's when we put out the clover and the oats and the ryegrass and then turn up kale hybrid at that time. This time, though, we put bicep out because we had to have some residual control because we weren't getting anywhere fast. These are basically the yield per pound per acre of corn and the cover crop yield. And we essentially had no weeds. We had a beautiful green sand of cover crops underneath things. And it was doing a good job. And the difference between 2010 and 2011 was 2010 we had plenty of moisture. 2011 we had moisture along. And then we dried off at the end. So we kind of had a wet year and then a dry year. Well, this year on what you call this year, we were supposed to finish up this was a two-year project. And we have the 2011 or 2010 project. We did it on my own. We missed making the cut for the grant by one. We were the alternate. But we were going to do it, so we went ahead and did it. That's how we got the information. So 2011 was actually our first year in 2012. We were supposed to finish up except for our corn crop got appraised at half a bushel. So we got it turned loose from crop insurance. I grazed it off green as quick as I could and we grazed cover crops over twice since then. So we're just simply going to finish up this project next year. Hopefully we do not have a repeat of 2012. These are the yields. Statistically, according to Rich's statistics, there is no significant difference between the four different treatments across yield. This slide here basically gives you the 2010 and the 2011 comparison year to year. It looks kind of busy, but it's all on one slide. It gives you an idea of what happened. This one is basically it's got the two different years, as well as all of the cover crops put onto it as far as the different yields of the cover crops and corn yields. I'm sorry, it's just kind of like that's what it is. Some of the basically the results that we've got so far and we were trying to come up with ways to establish cover crops of standing corn that didn't require an airplane. That's basically what we had to use before. So we tried the idea of scattering the cover crops earlier in the year when we were side dressing and then the old high clearance sprayer that we can stick along through standing corn and get along just fine. What we found was like the oats and the ryegrass, kale and the field peas, you have a great big fat window. It's almost three months and get a pretty reasonable stand of them over the course of the summer. The one that we couldn't get to go for nothing was a tillage radish. They work, tillage radishes work great but I think you pretty well got to plant them. You got to get them in the ground. They didn't seem to want to tolerate a broadcast seeding to get them to go. The cereal rye we didn't we thought we had pretty poor germination on the cereal rye the year we used it. That's why we didn't get anything as far as a percentage of the stand. That's kind of rye works, that's obvious everyone use it. It just didn't work in that situation for us. So we've gone to a lot of the annual ryegrass it seems to want to... In the wet years, we had a fairly good crop of seed cover crops growing in the leaf axels. Was it all set right there at the base of the leaf, right up against the corn stalk it was growing. I mean just, that's how wet it was. The thing we found on the seed soil contact part of it was there was no difference hardly at all between skip row solid stand high population versus low population. Not what you would have thought. It just it all got down. Rainfall obviously is kind of really really important and the residual herbicide part we found it's likewise just as important because we got to figure out we got to keep our weeds controlled down somehow to get our cover crops to come. The surprising part of it is that rate of bicep we found out doesn't affect soybeans or cowpeas either one. They grow right through it. You know, it's you're not supposed to use atrazine on soybeans. It either works really good it works really bad. There's no in between. You either got it or you're dead. The things we're looking at changing right now for 2012 and we changed it and we were going to do it was we were going to double up on our seeding rates try to get a lot more stuff growing. The thing we've done in that skip row was we didn't think of it to start with or didn't try it. We're trying to come up with a warm season broadleaf to grow in the corn that won't really be a competitor to the corn because we know we can get the yield of the corn to be pretty not as good as a solid stand but close. So what we did was we just went and got some group 6 I think these were 6.4 group 6-4 soybeans. Planted them. Guess what? They worked absolutely wonderful. I had the best beans in Montgomery County. They're this high. Pods all the way to the bottom. And they're green as a gourd right now. The beans are. I mean they finally froze. But the idea was to create a green forage to go with the corn. And it looks like it's going to work great. If you're a person that likes to use Roundup that totally opens up all your options to you. I just don't want to. Kind of a personal thing. But the soybeans growing in the corn I think the drought wiped us out as far as the corn this year. But hopefully next year we should be able to get some very good information on just how much feed we can grow. And the soybeans are going to be pretty well an ideal product because that's a high protein I mean your soybeans, a whole bean is 38% protein. It's high in calcium. It's a legume. So it should hopefully it's going to match up very well. But we'll see how it's going to grow. The thing that we're the kale is one of the things that we're taking out of it. It looks like you got a lot of feed and when you dry it down very much. Very little dry matter. Then we're going to take out the vacant skip row. We really would have thought that we were sure. Absolutely positive. We got a vacant skip row. We got 60 inches of background there. We surely can grow a lot more feed in it. And no more there than we was growing in the solid stand stuff. It just okay you live and you learn. But the thing we're going to add to it is crimson clover. We think that'll be a good one to go with it to blend in. And it's got another one of those that we have a long window that we can add it to grow it. But this is we have an animal feeding trial component that goes with this. But we learned something last year. You can look at that. You'll see those different ones that come along. There's only the one stripe. The other the blue and the yellow stripe are not there. When you have small pins with the lecternet and cornfield with lambs they commit suicide. They get hung up in the net and they died. So we had to change that whole plan around. So we're still reformulating how we're going to do the animal feeding side of it. But we're trying to compare it to where we've got lambs grazing in the corn with the cover crops against lambs on pasture. And then the three we're going for is pasture only corn and cover crops only and animals that have access to both. That's our yield trial to see on the lambs as far as that's where it's going to be set up to work next year. We didn't have corn to do it with this time. These are the daily gains of the different lambs. It's kind of like what we found once we quit killing lambs we were able to get some gains on them to test them and the lambs that had the cover crop were basically as good as the lambs on the pasture. But we didn't have the three-way to get a good comparison on them. We were only able to go 27 days because we ran out of cover crops on our corn pretty quick. That was our problem. So I realize that looks like a couple of idiots having a good time when you're riding around in a track like that in the middle of August next to the highway people drive by and go what are you doing? But that's what we did. Do you have any questions? I'll try to answer them or confuse you some more. Okay. Yes, sir. What about doing what about taking your forage with a player every other role being for a soybean? It ought to work. The reason the question was using basically a corn-soybean every other role mix should work fine. The reason we were going with the two and one is that's the way we started out to try to grow as much corn as we could to get as much energy per acre for that to come in to fill in with. I don't have any problems with every other one especially if a guy had a splitter planner or you could plan on 20s instead of 30 inch rows. I don't know. You do that when you can come up here next year. I'll listen to you. It ought to work. It should work. Years ago they used to mix corn and forage soybeans made tremendous solids. They did that very self-same thing. I think they planted a row of beans and a row of corn and chopped them. I mean but it should work. Any others? Substitute it for the turnip. What do you think? What did the anesthesia and turnips do to the tillage radish? The question was the substitute in turnips for the tillage radish A. cost B. We've had success getting the turnips to come up on a broadcast situation. We just couldn't really get the radishes to come up like that. We went so far as to like okay we've got 60 inches. A four wheeler will fit down that and I just got to get a planner I can drag down. It's like I'm going to go up and down every row on half mile rows. I thought about it but it's some way it's like most of these cover crops I've been able to see were far and away better off getting the seed in the ground if at all possible. If we got it up on top we're waiting for favorable weather events to get it to come. The radishes we just we couldn't get them but that don't mean they won't. We were after it as much more for the feed supply than for the tillage radishes primary main benefit is tillage radish as far as that depth in sequestering the nutrients. I wasn't really worried about it sequestering to me nutrients because we was going to get them. That's what I was after with the feed and everything we could get beside that would be a benefit.