 Cover crops are an integral part of sustainable agriculture because of their role in soil stewardship, pest management and crop rotation. While many vegetable farmers in the northeast use cover crops, typically the practice is limited to small grains for preventing winter soil erosion. This video features 10 experienced vegetable farmers from five states explaining how they use cover crops in more innovative ways. The farmers describe which species of cover crops they plant and how they are managed. Viewers can decide for themselves whether a particular practice is suited for trial on their own farm. I'm Hank Bissell. We're at Lewis Creek Farm in Starksboro, Vermont. We have 60 acres under cultivation, 35 acres of vegetables. We sell wholesale, retail at the farmer's market and retail at the farm stand. I'm a cover crop fanatic. Something that's not in vegetables I want to keep in a cover crop. I think of it as a bit of a free lunch where there's very little time or money invested for a lot of fertility returned. Winter rye is the basic cover crop that most people use. I used to just grow winter rye and about 10 years ago I started growing hairy vetch in with the rye. Hairy vetch is a winter annual. It's planted in the fall, puts on a little bit of growth, stays alive through the winter and then puts on a lot of growth in the spring, much the way rye does. Without nodulation, the vetch wouldn't fix any nitrogen. When I first started growing vetch, I inoculated it every year. I'm much more casual about it now, sometimes I don't inoculate it all. This field was not inoculated last fall and it does have nodules on it. Now that I've grown it all over my farm, the inoculant is resident in the fields. When I plow rye and hairy vetch down at this stage for crop, sweet corn for instance, I find that I can do without most of the normal nitrogen applications. I do put on a starter, I put on about 30 pounds with a starter mix, 30 pounds of nitrogen. Then I keep track of it with a pre-sidress nitrogen test to see if we've got heavy rains and we might lose a lot of it. I find that the amount of nitrogen that rye and hairy vetch produces will feed early to mid-season varieties of corn completely, so corn is up to about five feet high. When you get into those big, late varieties of corn, they seem to be using enough more nitrogen that it requires an additional side dressing. This is a field of oats and vetch. What's noticeable is there's no oats. This is the spring, the oats have winter killed. What's good about that is you don't have that coarse, grassy matter that takes so much time to break down. The major thing I like about oats and vetch is that when it's plowed it leaves a lot less stemmy trash and makes a nice fine seed bed. Good for direct seeding, the rye and vetch is better for transplanting. I like to get all the fields covered with a cover crop, but some crops come off too late in the season to get a cover crop in. The last seeding date for winter rye is October 15th. So for crops that are harvested after that date, you either have to leave the field bare or you can intercede them. We came in with buckets of rye seed, each person taking one row and scattering seed up through the row. One person could do an acre in 40 minutes. I use this technique of interceding rye on most of the late season coal crops, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussel sprouts. This was a field of cauliflower. The rows are closer together than brussel sprouts. You have to be a little bit careful not to get rye seed into the cauliflower plants. You don't want the rye to get in the plants because it'll actually grow in the head just from the moisture of dew alone. This is a field of brussel sprouts that was protected through the winter by winter rye. We got the rye on here the first week in September. We cultivated it in and now we have a good crop of rye protecting the field and something to plow down as well.