 everyone. In this recording we will provide an overview of our South Dakota JS340 cover crop worksheet or job sheet. We will identify the changes made to the cover crop species and properties found in table one. We'll explain the recommended and prepared mixed tabs found in the worksheet, provide an overview of the worksheet functions and demonstrate how to use the worksheet. We will also demonstrate the new cost estimate and vendor tabs and we'll discuss seed tags and practice certification. Before we go into all the functions of the cover crop worksheet, I'd like to briefly explain the worksheet purpose and how to use it. Essentially the cover crop worksheet documents and all the requirements found in the 340 cover crop standard. The seed mix plan must fix, stop or prevent the identified resource concern from occurring. That resource concern must be listed as a practice purpose in the standard. Criteria in the practice standard tells us what must be done to solve the identified problem. Because all purposes or problems cannot be solved the same way, additional criteria found in the standard explains what must occur to treat each specific resource concern. More than one resource concern can be addressed with the same mix provided the additional criteria for each purpose is met. Sometimes the producer has additional reasons for selecting a conservation practice. Solinity, although not specifically identified as a purpose, may be improved by addressing soil health or soil moisture use efficiency. Management considerations, like hay and grazing, are not practice purposes for this standard. And although they may provide some financial benefits to the producer, they may not meet the standard requirements. It is very important to keep in mind cover crop management cannot adversely affect the resource concern being treated. So with that let's go into the changes and functions of the worksheet. Next, Stacey will talk about changes and additions to table one. All right. Hello, I'm Stacey Turgeon, conservation agronomist in the Peer Area out of the Chamberlain Field Office. And I'm going to go over the table one changes and additions that we did that also show up in the cover crop tech note that was also released in October of 2020. So first of all, we did reorganize the cover crop species. We actually removed some of the species like tall wheatgrass and white clover. Since those weren't used very often, those were removed. We also changed the name of Ethiopian cabbage is now African cabbage. Line number eight right there. We added some species. We added collards, which got put in with kale. We added fava beans and valanza clover. And then the next thing that we did is we separated the millets. We put hay and proso millets separate due to their different seeding rates. And then we combined the mustards. So there is only one mustard entry now. So you can see the hay millet is only 15 pounds full seeding rate and the proso is 25. All right. The next thing that we did is we added an average cost per pound. And so we contacted different companies and they responded to our request. Most of the species had three different responses. So this average cost can be used as a general comparison. Just remember that this may not reflect the correct or current conditions or costs due to the seed and such. Next thing we did is we added the seeds per pound column. And that is over further here. So let's call them you. And this is to help determine if the species should be combined or separated due to seed size. Some examples are fava beans aren't with dry edible beans, proso millet versus hay millet, depending on the seed size in that you might not want to combine them and keep them separate if they have the capabilities of seeding them with the drill in separate boxes. All right. The next one is the winter survival column. We thought that this was important to put in here. It's column Q. So you're going to have a yes or a no or an S. And so the S would be considered sporadic. So under the right conditions, it could overwinter or potentially escape. Otherwise, the yes means it does survive and the no means it doesn't. Another column that we added was the shade tolerance. So let's call them V. This column can be used to determine which species would be best suited for a seeding that was going to be done in standing crop canopy or interceding. The other one we did is we changed the name. So in the previous table one, it was capture, recycle, redistribute nutrients in the soil profile. And now we just called it scavenge nutrients. And this column represents a species that will use surplus nutrients to reduce the risk of those nutrients being leached below the root zone or lost from the soil surface. The attract beneficial insects column was actually replaced with table two. Excuse me. This is also included in the techno two. So you can look at the different type of cover that you might be interested in developing or food and whether or not they attract bees or predator parasitoids. And so then the species are all in here and labeled appropriately. All right. One of the other things that we did is we kind of changed some of the goods, fares, and poor ratings based on how we have seen these cover crops perform across the state over the last, you know, 10, 12 years. So be aware of that some of the species that you may have thought had a good or fair rating could have changed. So familiarize yourself with those. And so now I'm going to show you how to use the filter options, which is really, really nice. So if you see this little drop down arrow here, you can go down here and unselect all. And if you were looking for species that were just good or fair or increasing soil organic matter, click OK. And it's going to just bring up the species that are good or fair or that particular resource concern. And there's this nice, clear all filters over here. It takes you back to what table one was before. So let's try another one. Let's look at what we're going to do as interesting here. So let's go to shade tolerance. And we just want the ones that are fair and good. OK. And it will bring the species over that are fair and good. So this should help you put together some of your seed plans. All right. Well, up next is Jason Miller. And he is going to go over the recommended cover crop mixes and some prepared mixes. OK. Hi, this is Jason Miller. I'm a conservation agronomist with NRCS based out of the Peer Field Support Office. I'm going to be covering a section in Job Sheet 340. A couple of tabs down here at the bottom. This is the main page that gets pulled up here, this cover crop worksheet. But I want to comment on a couple of the tabs down at the bottom. I will first cover the recommended cover crop mix tab. This tab was in the previous versions of this job sheet. It hasn't changed a lot. There was a few changes made. Most notably would have been the Ethiopian cabbage name here, would have been changed to African cabbage. That was just from a standpoint of Ethiopian being a variety of African cabbages. So we wanted to capture the main species there, which is African cabbage. This template was created years ago and it was really meant to create as an overview of looking at resource concerns that you found out in the field or that the producer indicated to you that he wanted to treat with a cover crop. And as you scroll down through here, you see we have one for compaction surface and subsurface, et cetera, et cetera. What we also have in this table are more broad categories. So basically each crop is broken into a crop type. And all this is explained in the cover crop. Tech note starting on page 28. Cool season grasses, your oats, barley, wheat, cereal, cereal rye, triticalia, annual rye grass. All these species are broken down into individual classes. And the reason I set it up this way was more or less to handle those situations where from year to year you may get a spike in certain cover crop species and you're able to substitute in their various species that would still fit this cover crop type. And we also have a percent of ranges listed identified for each of these crop types here. But one of the more common ones would probably be your organic matter or soil health mixture. When you see here, we have several different species and classes here. So you're looking at more of a maybe a little bit larger mix than you would have maybe for some other purposes. So with that, and you're able to actually see these, so I guess Mark will explain that, how you can actually pull up this table and pull it over to your other computer screen and be able to see when you're picking out or creating a new mix. What we also created or what Mark created was an additional tab down here called prepared mixes. This tab is going to allow the field office to really fine tune maybe some real common mixes out there. And again, let me scroll down to somewhat of a more common one increase soil organic matter, etc. We have here, you're able to actually modify this list right in here to tailor to your particular county. So if you wanted to change from oats to another cool season braille leaf such as barley, it would allow you to change that right here. You can also modify, I believe this mixture here, if you wanted to change the percent of these. So there's several different example ones that are already set up for your area or for the state. And you can go in here and fine tune these further for your particular county. I also wanted to comment there will be some additional items down here where you can create your own mix. And we have three different options here. There's a local mix in here that we already created that we'll be using you as far as part of this tutorial. And here's where you can create your own particular one. You'll have to remember what this 11 and 12 mixtures are when you get to the main page there. Again, all these are in the tech note 16 that was sent out. And I believe this is going to create some more flexibility and for you creating your specific mixes. So next on the list will be Mark Wachacek presenting an overview of the spreadsheet functions. Mark? When you open the South Dakota Job Sheet 340 you will open it to the cover crop worksheet and that's where you'll put your information in for your particular cover crop that you're planning. And so I've already entered some of the information, the producer name and phone number, the field office name and phone number. You want to enter this information, especially the phone numbers and the office names because they're carried over to the vendor sheet and that gives the vendor an opportunity to call someone if there's a question about filling the order or about substitutions. So that's an important thing. You can put in the conservation district and the plant practice purpose. There's a drop down there for you to select from the purposes and the standard. So you should put in the program that you're planning for if there is one and for CSP just to show you that example there's actually a second box to fill out which enhancement that you're completing. So I'm just putting that one in for an example. Then next thing, what we want to take a look at here is that we have a box that's optional to select a prepared mix and that's basically a selection based on the purpose that you're trying to accomplish. In this example I used soil health and organic matter is my purpose to increase those and so I'm going to pick number two increase the organic matter. It gives me a warning that it's going to delete all the plan and applied data that I've previously entered so I'm saying okay yes that's fine because it's going to prepare a new plan with species and percent and so if I already entered a whole bunch of stuff here in the plan section and even in the applied section it will delete it and it will now plan the new prepared mix based on my selection. So that's the way that works. I want to go back for a second and remind you that there are red triangles in some cells that actually give you more direction instruction tips and so on and so take a look at those if there's a red triangle it's probably telling you something that could be helpful to you. So let's take a look at the print button before we get too far. Once you get what you want completed in the plan or the plan and the application sections you can print any one of these sheets out that that I've got listed here cover crop worksheet the one we're on now cost estimate vendor sheet mixes prepared mixes and so on just check the box next to the one you want or the ones you want they can be multiples and then you can print preview and you can print directly without previewing the preview lets you preview and then there's a button there that you can click to print also so use that in either way a pretty handy option for you for when you get to printing these. So let's build a little bit of a plan here for this prepared seating mix for increasing soil organic matter you'll notice that it put the species and percents in but it didn't complete any of the rest of the worksheet basically. What we need to do is tell it what kind of seating equipment we're going to use because it'll calculate a different rate based on whether I use a drill or broadcast the seed in this case I'll choose drill so now it knows the rates that we want to plant we need to tell that how many acres we're going to plant I'm going to choose 44 in this particular case and once it knows that it can calculate the in the total seed that is required and so you see that that works pretty slick and easy you can then put your crop history in that makes a difference on as far as herbicide carry over and you can read that statement when you're using that tool so let's take a look at how does this view recommended mixes I'm going to actually go back and say yeah I'm going to build my own mix here and so I'm going to not have a prepared mix so I put it on a blank or I could delete that cell also just hit the delete key it'll it'll erase all the information I had so let's take a look at how view recommended mixes works it pulls up a little table from techno 16 and if I want to build a mix based on eliminating compaction here's my guidelines from techno 16 and so on so forth for nutrient scavenging for utilization of spring soil moisture so you can use this and then you can come over here and actually make selections and use the spreadsheet as you view this and you can actually print this out so you can have it at your desk too and when you're done with it you can move around you can close it down so that's that's the way that works I want to show you then that we can add if if your species that you want to apply isn't in the list this comes from techno 16 you'll notice an odd one at the end there I'm going to show you that I already added one but the way it works is it pops up the table one and you can't even select any of the information in table one but you can use the filters and we'll show you that in a little bit but here I've added I don't know that industrial hemp will ever be a a cover crop but I used it as an example and I made these numbers up but here's where you enter your numbers the blue cells you can enter your own species and once you do that you click the return button and you will be back to the cover crop worksheet and you'll have the opportunity to select that species that you entered and if you pick a percentage that you're going to apply it'll calculate the pounds that you need so that's the way that works I'm going to not use that in this example so um yeah the other thing I want to show you is is basically kind of how that you how you can edit the prepared mixes up here I want to show you that button so if I go there here are the prepared mixes here's the purpose and the species and in techno 16 it says like for example hey millet you can use also proso millet so you could change that to proso millet here and then number two would pop over there when you selected it with proso mill it in if that's what you're going to use in your county most of the time that would be the way to to use this is to come in here and change this and save it and then use it and then I'll show you that you can make your own local mixes and down here at 11 here's the first one local mix there's three of these that you can enter in I've already entered the species in in the percents so I didn't have to do that right now but I've already done it and I've saved it so I have a local mix number 11 that has these species in it so I'm going to go back to and this is a return button uh all the way down alongside so I can just click return when I'm done editing or adding that pops me back to the cover crop worksheet and if I select number 11 from my list local 11 says I'm going to eliminate a delete the plan and applied data that's fine it pops that set of species and that percents those percents into the planned cover crop worksheet and so just one other thing I want to point out here I guess is this 23 percent just make sure that you do understand that that's 23 percent of NRCS's full seeding rate okay and we'll get into that the difference between that and when we check out a practice and how seed tags list percent of the seed we'll get into that pretty deep here in a little bit so next we have Valerie presenting information about the cost estimate and the vendor tab I am the agronomist out here based out of the Rapid City Field Office and I'm going to talk about the cost estimator for planning purposes and the vendor sheet so the this top part is the information you actually filled out in the cover crop job sheet this first worksheet there name of the producer the field office who planned it phone numbers and all of that this is just an average of the information we got from table one that we'll use in this it can depend change pending on which dealer you actually price it with and then the supply and demand sometimes one year something's really popular another year something else may be popular so it is good to get a request from the actual vendor when you decide this is what makes you actually want but we're using this for planning purposes so that if you have a producer that's worried about cost we can give them an idea of how much it would cost before and so they can go to their bank or just having knowledge of what it's going to cost so this is the seeding mix we used mark used in his example so it has the percentages here average cost the pounds that were needed per acre so that makes the cost and then it was times 44 acres so that's the pounds needed for 44 acres and that's the total cost of the brassica hybrids for that 44 acres and then it gives the cost for each one then we give a bunch of rows in case you have a really diverse mix and then it gives the total cost per acre down here it's 11 pounds cost $14 and then for 44 acres we need 491 pounds and the cost is 623 so it just gives the producer an idea of what they're doing okay then we'll go to the vendor sheet this is an actual worksheet you'll have the producer give to the vendor they select to get the cover crop seed from so this also has all the information that the other one did that comes from the first page name producer of the producer the field office who the planner was so that's good to know who planned it so that there needs to be a substitution or there's a question about why it was planned a certain way they knew who to contact that approval has to be prior made to the purchase producer putting it in the ground they can either use a variety or use common seed each bag must have a seed we must get a seed tag at the end from what they purchased and the amount that they purchased and follow the state seed laws which Eric will cover more in depth of that so this has the mix again and then the percent percentage of the full seeding rate the pounds per acre acres to be seeded total and total pounds and then it also has a percent by weight so just depending on the size the size that kind of changes it from this 10 percent to the 6 percent these are smaller seeds so the weight is less in this mix than larger seeds like millets they're they're heavier so they're a larger percent of the mix by weight um but and then you'll see they both equal 100 percent so the one of the big things also that because in we have in the tech guide is now that we require the um to be at least 85 percent viable and if it's not 85 percent percent viable germination then you're required to do it by pure live seed pounds and it talks about pure live seed is purity times germination or total viability and yeah it requires each species in the mix not this mix as a whole but each species in the mix must be greater than 85 percent and that's all I have and next we'll go back to mark so after I've completed the planned section and have all the species and percents pounds that I am going to need with for my 44 acres when the seeding is done I can take and complete the applied section and so the first thing I want to do there is use the copy species from planned if they were identical and in this case I'm going to show you that this would then delete all the applied data that I previously entered okay it actually is telling me then how to complete the applied section so just a little reminder if a mix was applied and one seed tag lists all the species in the mix then I'm going to enter the bulk pounds applied and the acres planted in J and L 51 so I'm going to enter it here and here so really it's saying did I have a mix did they pre-mix it for me is it do I have one seed tag with all the species listed that's one way that cover crops get sold and the other way is you could buy individual species and you'd have a seed tag for each species so if you had five species you'd have five seed tags each listing the purity and germination for that species so that's another way that they sell it if that's the case then what you're going to do is you're going to enter the bulk pounds that you bought and applied and actually got seeded in the field in rows 53 through 67 whatever species you have so here I'd have five numbers in here in the bulk pounds and then you're going to put the acres in L 51 again okay and you need to enter the applied method also up here in M 51 so that's just reminding how to fill this out okay so in our example what we had was a seed tag and I'm going to use this seed tag right here and it's a real one it happened and there's your five species and they're the five I've got listed there and you can see I've given an example how you would complete this with your five species and the purity in this particular case is the percent in the mix not necessarily the purity of a species like you would find on a single scene tag so by weight this is 6.64 percent brassica hybrids so we're going to go back here and I've actually already put these numbers in a place where I can copy them so I don't have to take quite as long to enter them that's all I'm doing now the purity for each one of these is not purity necessarily it is the percent in mix okay so I've got that entered and there's a little red triangle that tells you what you're putting in here depending on the seed tag that you have the type of seed tag so then the germination if it's 85 percent or greater I'm not going to enter anything here because Techno 16 says that if it's 85 percent or greater it's going to treat it just like it was 100 percent and so that's what this spreadsheet does if it's less than 85 I'm going to put the percent in here so you will see in my seed tag examples every one of these germinations is 90 percent so I don't have to put anything in there in that example so we have a bolt pounds of seed and what I'm going to say is we bought 500 pounds of this seed you can see from my plan that I needed 491.92 pounds of PLS of this seed to come out to our standard so I bought 500 pounds okay I seeded 44 acres just like the plan so I'm trying to match it up as much as I can in this example and my seeding method was drill all right so it actually then makes the calculation based on this 500 pounds of the mix that was these percent in the mix and what it also does for you is calculates the percent of NRCS full seeding rate total was 102 percent and so I actually met my requirements in that particular case being over 100 percent of the planned requirements so let's go one step further and let's say just to show you how this works that and I'm going to pop over here to the seed tag examples again and I'm going to scroll down to the bottom there's an example where the individual added some oats bin run oats okay so then they need to get a test on the bin run oats and here in this particular case they got a it's a purity test and a germination test so you can see the numbers I don't know if you can or not down here but they are here 99.47 percent purity and we're going to say you put in 300 pounds of this okay so we're going to go back here and the germination on this particular one is 95 percent so I don't have to put anything in the germination column if it was less than 85 I'd have to put something in there so 99.47 and 300 pounds so I'm going to select oats and you'll notice that I'm putting a pound figure in this column that's because I have one species with one test and that's how you handle that and you can have a mix and a single species and that's why I'm showing you this example that actually he really only put on 298 pounds of seed that comes out to about 9.7 percent of a full seeding rate of NRCS so now we're up to 110 percent full seeding rate so I just wanted to show you how that works if you're going to add bin run oats or if you're going to add some soybeans or something on that order that you got to get a test and Eric I think get into that quite a bit more here in the next presentation so that's basically how that works I do want to show you this that these percents have really nothing in common with these percents up here so this percent here is the percent by weight in the mix if I have these species and the total I'm going to I'm going to delete my oats for right now simply because I want to show you this how this works so the seed that I have total is 496 pounds okay and this six percent six point six four percent that percent times the 496 pounds will equal the pounds of the brassica hybrids I have in this mix okay so it's the percent of the total weight of the mix ends up being these brassica hybrid seeds up here this percent is 10 percent of NRCS's full seeding rate we say you should put on seven pounds 10 percent of that is seven tenths of a pound total different calculation these percents don't relate to these percents however I will get you back to percent of NRCS full seeding rate with this spreadsheet by making a calculation here when we're done that this six percent on these 44 acres with this 33 pounds ends up being 10.8 percent of our NRCS full seeding rate so you can see there is a comparison but it's not in this column it's in the last column okay so I'd like to show you one other thing and that is that the calculation of the percent of NRCS full seeding rate is based off of of course the bulk seed that was planted and the acres it was planted on but also the seeding method that was used so right now the calculation is based off of the fact that he drilled the seed and if that is changed the spreadsheet automatically redos the calculation to come up with the percent of NRCS full seeding rate for broadcast seed so you don't have to do anything you just have to make sure you've got the right application method selected here and in the end we're only at 67 percent of a full NRCS seeding rate if you broadcast it however if they drilled it you're at 102.2 so you can see that that makes a difference and you need to have the correct actual applied seeding method selected so then the certification part down here I just want to show you how this works and they'll get into it quite a bit more but there's a guide to certification okay it's a little red triangle so you need to read that and it walks you through the steps when you're going to record certification and which method you're going to use to certify the practice needs to be recorded on the application section down here so it basically says that you always start with the certification process for the seed tag that's the thing we just went through we were 101 percent of our planned rate of NRCS's full seeding rate and so basically what we what we were into is where it says if the seeding rate does not meet excuse me if applied seed plant planting date method meet the conservation practice standard and the total seed applied meets 100 percent or more of the NRCS full seeding rate then I'm going to check the yes box and indicate that it was the seed tag method so what that means is I'm going to say yes here and I'm going to indicate that the method I used was percent of full seeding rate and then it lets me enter the data in here it's 101.2 and I did the field check which you need to do according to the standard is I did a field check on you know you put the date in so that's the way that works if in fact it doesn't meet that then you would select one of the other methods and then then it's asking you for number of plants and so on and so forth so that is the way that works you always put your comments down here if it doesn't meet or even if it meets you can put comments down here you can say I'm you know attached a photo of it of the field or whatever so that is the way all of that is set up to work next we have Eric Barsnes and he's going to discuss the worksheet and how you use various seed tags and going in and he's going to go into the practice certification part of this a little deeper Eric well hello everyone thank you to this section of the recording my name is Eric Barsnes I'm the agronomist over in the Brookings area and I'm going to go through a couple things on our job sheet for you today I wanted to start out kind of the overlay or the overall layout of this job sheet there's a few things you need to fill out at the top and one good reference here is the the cover crop tech note 16 so that can there's a link right here in the in the tech note where you can or in the job sheet that will take you right to the tech note otherwise all tech notes are found in ephotog under section one tech notes so you can get it on ephotog or you can get it right through this link right here and that tech note is actually going to be a really good reference as you're going through the certification process of cover crop it's going to be pretty handy when you're planning the cover crop practice as well so we got the tech note right there there's a couple other parts I wanted to point out within this job sheet there's crop history section of this job sheet and the current crop refers to the crop that was growing in the same basically crop season that you're going to plant the cover crop so in this example that I have pulled up here the producer grew oats this growing season he harvested the oats now he's going to come back and he's going to see the cover crop following the harvest of those oats so that's what's referred to as a current crop the previous crop would have been grown the year before the oats were grown because we want him to evaluate his herbicide program for both the oats and the previous year in this example the producer grew soybeans before he grew the oats so that's the two crops that we want him to evaluate his herbicide history on to see if there's any carryover issues potentially for the cover crop or if there's any grazing issues that he needs to be concerned of with on there and this the herbicide section there's a pretty good paragraph within that tech note 16 and that begins on page 11 of that tech note you can um write that that section to review some herbicide history um so with that I will go into a little bit about the seed tags on um when you're evaluating the seed tags to complete this job sheet so there's a tab down here at the bottom you come down here to seed tag examples and here you can see a handful of seed tag examples that can be referred to when you're trying to complete the job sheet you get questions questions may come up when you're trying to complete this section on how to fill this out and I actually have a few notes that I've completed that I want to refer to so I'm going to drag this screen over here so you can see this very clearly and see what I'm talking about here so number one we want to collect the seed tag information and complete the applied section of the job sheet probably prior to going to the field and evaluating these cover crop plantings for a couple different reasons we want to have some of this data with us when we get to the field so we know what we're looking at looking for we want to know what he was supposed to plant what he did actually get planted and we're going to get that from the seed tag and this is one example of various ways that we see seed tags come in to our offices so in this example here the producer had a pre-mix all these cover crop species were already blended together in a pre-mix from one of the seed companies and pretty much every seed company that I've worked with has a set number of these pre-mixes that they have available for producers so this could come in from a variety of any of the seed vendors out there when a when a seed tag is provided to you this in this fashion you can follow these blue areas to figure out how to fill this out you're just going to fill out the the species selection then you're going to come over here and it's listed under the purity column in the seed tag and you're going to put that in the purity or the percent in the mix so these are already in decimal format so you don't have to do a point six four six six four you just simply type them in right off the seed tag if the germination is less than 85 percent you will also include that in this column here and then the biggest part that you need to do is you have to get a invoice from the producer or some documentation that shows how many pounds of seed were purchased and then you got to confirm that with the producer that those number of pounds that he purchased was seeded on how many acres so this spreadsheet will do some math for us and it will calculate out the percent of an nrcs full seeding rate based on this information the percent in the mix the total number of pounds that was purchased and then the number of acres those were planted on and a good check with uh with all this stuff is when you're visiting with the producer and you're collecting this information always ask him what the the drill actually got seeded you know he set the drill to you know 10 pounds per acre but when he got all said and done it was actually more like 11.3 that actually got seeded so we want to know the actual seeding that the drill got put out there so that's a good check for you guys to confirm that with the producer figure out what he set the drill at and then what it would confirm what actually got drilled out there in this example here all the numbers calculated out and he was over the 100 percent required based on the certifying the practice which i'm going to get it into in a little bit so this would be all that we need to do in this seeding example now another way that seed tags often come to our offices not in a premix but maybe what we call a custom mix so we worked with the producer we said to meet the purpose of your planting you need a handful of different species so the seed company went to each individual bag in their warehouse and they dumped those seeds in and they made the mix for the producer based on the number of acres he needed to seed or wanted to seed so in this example maybe i can blow that up a little bigger each seed species in the mix has its own seed tag so we've got your fessex grape seed we've got some purple top turnips and we got radish on here and each one has its own seed tag information so in this example we have the purity on the on the seed tag so we can type that in for each one of these species and then we have the germination also listed on here and you can you can type that in that's in this column here the germination is is 90 for the purple top turnip it's 85 for the radish so you're going to put the purity and the and the germ in there if it's less than 85 percent if it's greater than 85 percent then we don't even need to put it in there there's nothing no calculations that are going to happen so you don't need to don't need to enter it in that case so all right where am i at so here we are here now we know that how much seed was was uh purchased based on those seed tags and then we need to come back to the invoice um from the producer invoice details here to know how many pounds of each of these species because these seed tags are just a 50 pound bag of each of these species that the the seed company used now we're going to use the invoice to calculate how many pounds of each of those species actually got put in there and so now we can put that right in the the bulk seed individual species column we don't need to know the the total pounds because of the calculations will get done based on each individual species so we'll calculate that uh enter that in the spreadsheet we'll calculate that all out for us we always need to put the the number of acres that actually got planted that we're going to certify we're going to enter that in this column or this cell here and then I should go back and say we also need to make sure that the the method of seeding is is entered right here it's either broadcast or drill in this case this example the the seeding was broadcast and here's some documentation by an invoice that says exactly how many acres got done it was aerial seeded by a custom applicator then he seeded a couple different fields a couple different number of acres there and those two fields up this was our total number of acres we got done and then we got our percent of a of a seeding put in here so in this case you did not make the hundred percent so we have a few different options i'm going to get into on the certifying uh the the cover crop standard as well in a little bit um here's another seed tag that often comes in for these custom mixes so here we have the individual species we have the percent in the mix which we don't really need to do unless the germ is less than 85 there's the purity the germ hard seed and so forth where we can come over here as long as the the germ is 85 we can we can put the total bulk pounds in just like we did up above here for each of those species so that's another common or popular seed tag example that you can use to complete this when each individual individual species is provided like that there's another example as i scroll down here a third example that uh you might see again the cover crops came in by individual species kind of put together as a custom blend so this in this example you can just follow the blue areas and arrows and read through here like we did before the percent is actually percent by weight in the mix so we're going to put that percent in the mix in that column there we're going to double check the germination on the individual species within the seed tag itself and anyone any species that are less than 85 percent we're going to put the germ in here and then it will do the math for us to calculate the percent of seeding rate once we fill in the total bulk pounds and the number of acres that actually got planted again these these numbers come from the the invoice that's provided by the producer or or by the the vendor so we need to get that information from them to be able to complete this is the the seed tag is is not enough by itself because we don't know how many pounds of seed or how many acres uh was planted and again double check the uh the um seeds planted per acre that the drill was set at or what the aerial pilot if he provided that some of these seed tags will actually give us uh a recommended seeding rate and that's why this is important we can double check that that matched the the seed tag when it says the seed at a at a certain rate um there's one more example here as i scroll down that i want to go over with you guys there's a fourth example so we we had the the pre-mix that the producer had purchased and then we're going to enter all that information just exactly the same as we did an example one but in this this time the producer added some bin run seed that he had at his own farm so he had some oats that were that he wanted to include in this mix to get a little bit more grass in his uh in his in his cover crop blend so in this case when we have bin runs uh seed we need to make sure that the producer had a seed test done on that uh so that we can get the germ germination of the seed test so here's what a seed test would look like there's a number of different places they can get um these seed seed tests done and from my understanding they take about two weeks to complete and roughly $50 probably would be a rough estimate um for a seed test to get done so in this example here this was done at South Dakota State University seed testing lab and the information that we need from from this uh seed tag is example four here it is all right we need to know um the germination the viable seed and we're gonna put those in that we're gonna put the percent once the math is done off the seed tag this 99.47 that's the number that we're actually going to enter in to the job sheet you can just follow these blue arrows whenever you have questions or concerns on what number goes where so that blue arrow just followed a backup and made sure that if it was over 85 we don't need to enter anything in the germination column but if it was below 85 that's we're going to enter that there um since this example it was over 85 is all we did was put the the total viable seeds in this column here in the spreadsheet did the math force to calculate that out and so that's how we would add that um bin run seed to our um applied section of our cover crop job sheet um if you got any questions on that you can contact one of your local agronomists and we can help you through it but make sure that they uh they get that seed test and like I said usually about two weeks uh it takes a seed testing lab to run those tests so make sure they think ahead or plan ahead when they're when they're operating that so that concludes my my seed tag examples I can go through one more section with you guys I can go through the certifying process to look in a little bit more detail so I'll minimize this screen and I will jump back over to the cover crop worksheet itself and we can talk about certifying the practice so there's couple different ways we can certify the practice we can hopefully enter the information like I just went through with you guys on the seed tag we can enter that information and I have an example already filled out here for you it's one of the I think it was um maybe example number three they had this information on there we went over here it was drilled we have the number of acres the total pounds that was seeded um this is a percent of the nrcs full seeding rate um in this example it was over the hundred percent so we can go out now and we can do our field check and we can make sure um there's a couple different reasons for doing the field check we can see how each of these individual species did in the mix you know give us some some insight on when we're doing future planning with producers which species are doing the best um we can we can evaluate the growth of those we can double check that the field actually got seeded we can give a rough estimate of how many acres were seeded and we can verify that with the producer so we're going to go to the field we're going to do those things we're going to come down here to the certification section and we have a few options we can certify that this seeding was verified using the seed tags full seeding rate we can we can grab this number from right up there the percent of the full seeding rate 104.7 put that in there and we can put the date whatever date you happen to go to the field we can put that in in the section here that would conclude um and verify that that seeding was we can certify that seeding so let's uh i'll go through another example what if the the seeding did not meet 100 percent of our full seeding rate so the seed was put on a little bit thinner than it was supposed to be the seeding did not make the 100 so we have a few options at this point as well we can go to the field and we can you can see here in the drop down there's a basically three different methods we can use the percent cover we can use plants per square foot or we can do a clipping of the biomass so first of all i'm going to refer and go over the the percent cover with you so to evaluate the percent cover we're going to go to the field and we're going to randomly select three different locations and this is all explained in the tech note so you don't have to memorize this or write this down we can go through maybe i can just uh share my screen that portion of the screen with you here and i can show you what i'm referring to so right here i'm on page 12 of our cover crop tech note general guidelines to determine stand success here's the information it takes to certify the practice seed tags um looking for the 85 percent we need a receipt or invoice to document the total pounds that were purchased we need to know which fields were seeded and how many acres of those seeds of those fields got seeded uh in recent times we've had a lot of prevent plant we've had a lot of drowned out areas um it's pretty common for the entire field not to get seeded so we want to know how many acres of each each field did get seeded and then the date that that was accomplished and then we also need to know if it was drilled or broadcast so like i mentioned earlier it's always good information to know what the drill got set at and what the drill actually got accomplished as far as pounds per acre and then another good thing to know is what was the drill spacing and you can either ask the producer that or we're going to evaluate that when we go out there to do our field check so either way so um that's our our certification process um if any times if any items two through six above were not met then we can go out and do a field check we can randomly sample three locations throughout the field sampling can be done on a one foot square uh basically 12 by 12 inches uh like a pvc um square that's put together i've seen that we can use a range hoop um what works pretty good is to lay down uh two grazing sticks in an L fashion and that you can estimate your 12 inch square that way so those are a couple of the different methods you can use to come up with your sampling area and then we want to um if we're going to use the the percent cover like i mentioned um we want to look straight down when we're in the field we want to look straight down at the ground and try to estimate what percent uh of the ground is showing or what percent is covered by the the biomass of the cover crop so we need 40 percent um cover cover to uh use this method to certify the practice so there's a couple helpful hints i can also show you there's an app available a free app put together and and put out by oklahoma state university um it's very easy to download and free to download um and it works pretty good for using this uh for helping you assess this this percent cover option it's called canopy oh so this is what the app looks like it's a free download works very well um and you can take take that to to help you evaluate what your cover crop uh percent residue percent biomass cover is so that app is pretty helpful i would encourage you guys to use that to go ahead and download that so what you're going to do is you're going to take your phone you're going to take a picture using this app and you need to be at least two feet above the top of the canopy cover so somewhere around shoulder height uh works pretty good so you can still see your phone you can still make sure you're getting a good square picture uh you're going to take the picture and then step number two the app is going to ask you to adjust or slide around your picture to make sure it matches with the default setting because it's trying to compare green vegetation with the ground below it you're going to confirm that and then uh lastly you can add notes so producer's name site number one site number two site number three you can put the field number uh field name the location that you're at it also takes gps coordinates for you but your notes would probably be easiest once you get that all completed you can come back to the office and then you you will need to set up a login with this app and then when you get back to the office you can just simply go on your computer log into your account and you can gather the information that you just uh included from your phone you can get all that right from your from your computer so so that app works pretty good for um for doing the percent cover so if the if the the seating does meet the percent cover then we can use that as a certifying method so we can choose that we can enter the the percent cover and then the date that we went out to the field and and did the did the work so that's uh one method another method that we can do method two is plants per square foot so to accomplish this method we're we're also gonna you know start by filling up getting the the c tags and we're gonna complete this section and see where we fall within the percent um cover and then we're gonna evaluate these species when we go to the field um but for this section we're actually going to um go to three random locations again within the field and we're gonna jot this down we're gonna use either that that 12 inch square pvc square we're gonna lay the two grazing six in an L fashion or we're gonna use the the range clipping hoop we can do that as well um we're gonna count the plants um per square foot so I mentioned earlier we want to know what the row spacing is that the drill was set at if it was drilled if it's broadcast then we're just going to simply take the plants that are in our area but if it was drilled and the rows are greater than 12 inches we're only going to evaluate one foot of row spacing if it was less than 12 12 inches then we possibly will have two rows in there to evaluate or count plants in so so we we want to know what the row spacing is so we make sure we get that accomplished um uh correctly and timing to do any of these things you know we probably want to do them when once the cover crops are up pretty well and make sure that all the plants have have emerged that are going to emerge but we don't want the cover crop to be too large that it's hard to to navigate through and and sort through this stuff so somewhere in that you know uh 30 30 to 30 day 45 day mark would probably be a good good timing to be in depending on your rainfall and your conditions um a couple little cautions for you guys if they have small grains in their mix we don't want to count the tillers we want to try to count individual plants so the larger the cover crop becomes and the more tillers out the more difficult it is to tell if it's a tiller or if it was an actual seeded plant so that would be one reason to get out there a little bit earlier to try to make sure we get um adequate uh plants counted um another uh another thing to make sure to do when you're counting these plants uh per square foot if um if we control or excess moisture was your purpose then we want to make sure that we add five plants per square foot to our calculation and that's explained in the in the tech note as well I can there's kind of two sections to this I can scroll kind of up and down um and or to these general guidelines uh it explains it right here in the first bullet point we want approximately 12 plants per square foot number should be increased by five plants per square foot when we control or excess moisture utilization is the primary purpose and here's where it talks about the 40 canopy cover and last I'm going to talk about the clipping um of the of the cover so if we use the plants per square foot we can just put uh come in here and type that in however plants many plants we ended up finding and then we're going to put the corresponding date in there as well so we want to make sure we come back and complete this so it is going to require you to get in and out of this job sheet a couple times the first time complete the the above portion the calculations portion then we're going to go to the field do our work if if needed um you know whatever part is needed we're always going to go to the field so there's going to be something that you're going to need to do out there whether it's just simply to check to make sure the field got seated or if you're going to do one of these other certification evaluation methods east river and west river on the biomass clipping have slightly different numbers so we want to make sure you're choosing the correct option that you do on here and that's explained in the tech note as well if we are east river biomass clipping production needs to be at least 1800 pounds per acre and 1200 pounds per acre if we're west river and this is evaluated within six to eight weeks of growth so not necessarily of date seated you know if we're super dry nothing emerged for a while we want to make sure we wait for it to emerge and then we're going to come out six to eight weeks of growth and see what our clipping was and you can follow the the typical rain clipping process for this you know we can use that hoop if we want we can use the 12 inch 12 inch square we want to make sure we let these plants air dry for a minimum of five days but typically seven seven to four 14 is more common we want to make sure that we stir these plants every probably every day or two to make sure that they don't get really moldy and and cause issues with our numbers if we're using the the range hoop we're going to multiply our number our grams by 50 we're using the 12 inch we're going to multiply our grams by 96 and that will give us our our dry weight number so when we're doing our clipping we want to take all the above ground biomass we don't want to include any of the tubers if we have rascals in the mix we want just the above ground vegetation um i think that might conclude my method or my certification process in our video so once we once we get our numbers after we've air dried that we can come back and type in you know whatever our numbers happen to be and then the date that we did the clipping uh we can put that in as well so make sure we always come back and complete the job sheet check yes or no if we didn't meet this you know there might be times we we didn't meet it you know if we came up short on on any of these processes that i explained why we're just simply not going to meet the purpose so or not going to be able to certify that field so make sure we're getting everything completed as we need to so with that i thank you for watching my video and have a good day