 Hi, I'm Mike Ostley, research agronomist here at the Carrington Research Extension Center. I'm standing here today at the site of our Field P and Canola intercropping trial. So you might ask, why would I consider intercropping? Intercropping is actually as old as agriculture itself. And the reason that we want to consider it is because biologically you can actually get more production per area than you could with growing a single crop. And with today's technology and innovations all around, intercropping has never been more adaptable to a farm. But it's not without its flaws. So here we're looking at field peas in Canola. And one of the big advantages here is that we're trying to fight weakness with a strength. So field peas are pretty low residue, but they fix nitrogen. Canola uses a lot of nitrogen and provides pretty nice residue. And it can help support the field peas at the end of the season so there's not as much lodging. So when you pair these two together we're trying to create a system that should have lower inputs and higher productivity than either crop on its own. And the way we do this is we cut back on the seeding rates a little bit compared to what you would normally plant in a single crop. And then we're expecting to get a little bit less yield of either crop. And in return you might get something like 60% of a normal yield of each crop. And so what you end up with is maybe 120% total production compared to again either crop on its own. So agronomically it works pretty well. It's not always so straightforward. In order to adapt this on your farm you're going to have to get a little creative in trying to figure out how you're going to make it work with your planting setup. And very likely you're going to end up having to do some kind of separation at harvest because in most cases the crops still get marketed separately. And so unless you find a specialty market that will accept mixed grain intercrops you're going to have to find a way to separate the grain after harvest. Now in this plot right here is a really good example of what's going on. We're putting both the field peas and the canola down the same furrow at planting. And they both kind of support each other as they're coming up. We seed it kind of at a medium depth total. So we got a small seeded canola and a large seeded field pea. They like to be at different depths normally so we kind of pick a medium seeding depth. And the field peas as they're coming up help to create a more uniform emergence on the canola which is seeded deeper than it would normally like. Now in our best case scenarios out here when we've done this in the past we found up to 30% overproduction. And so in other words we've been able to get up to 30% more total yield per acre than with either crop. But the range can be anywhere from 5% up to our 30%. So my number one recommendation to somebody that's interested in intercropping is to test it out first on your farm. Every farm is going to do intercropping different than the next one. And so small plots on farm research is really necessary before you get into this. And you're going to want to play around with things like seeding rates and fertility strategies and really try to tailor this to what works best for your operation.