 My name is Steve Groff from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I farm about 200 acres of cropland of about 80 of that is vegetables. I farm with my parents and my family, and this farm has been in our family for three generations now. We market most of our vegetables to stores and restaurants. About a third of them is marketed locally, and then the rest are marketed toward the Philadelphia area. I started using cover crops about 20 years ago, and I did that originally just for soil erosion control, particularly over winter when the fields may be bare, and a couple years later I started realizing additional benefits that cover crops give me, mainly having to do with soil health, increasing the aggregate stability of the soil, increasing the microbiological soil life, and we were able to measure that and document those results through university research on this farm. One of the important philosophies that I have in cover cropping is to have something living in the soil at all times, and as soon as my crop is finished, that's a cash crop, I plant a cover crop as soon as possible. For instance, for sweet corn or early sweet corn when it's finished at the beginning of July, I get right in and plant a cover crop as soon as I can. It might be oats or a mixture of harry vetch and oats depending on the situation, and then throughout the rest of the season, I'm going to be planting a cover crop as soon as the field is finished. This is the no-till drill that I use to plant my cover crops. I also use it to plant some of the small grains that I grow as well. This drill is really a good one to be able to penetrate down through crop residues and be able to put the seed down in the soil. That's one thing that's very, very important when you're seeding cover crops is to get that seed into the soil to get good seed-to-soil contact. I usually use the normal rates that are used for my area here in planting my cover crops. What I've discovered though in my experience is that you can do that if you know you're getting a good seed-to-soil contact, if you have a good planter that is able to cut down through that residue and seed the seeds correctly. If the planter is so-so or you just have a lot of residue, you're going to have to increase your seeding rate in order to get the kind of stand establishment that you desire. One of the challenges of planting in the high residue is it's hard to see where your previous pass was when you're seeding. I put a foaming marking system on my no-till drill and my no-till planter so that I can see where to plant when I'm coming back through. Because I'm a no-till farmer, I have to consider the kind of residue that my cover crop will generate and consider the kind of crop residue that's remaining on the field. That determines then what kind of cover crop I'm going to plant. This field here is just finished with sweet corn and I will just plant hairy vetch in here. There is enough residue on the ground that the crop generated that I don't need to add oats like I would if the field would be almost bare. In order to be able to plant into cover crops, they need to be rolled down. I got this machine which is a Buffalo rolling stalk chopper originally used to roll down corn stalks in the spring and I adapted it to work in my situation. The main thing I had to do was to put a collar around the bearing here so it wouldn't wrap when I'm rolling rye and to put parallel linkage on each one of these rollers so that it could flex with the terrain of the land. I use this to roll down the cover crops in the spring and also some of my crops like sweet corn and pumpkins when they're finished to roll them down in preparation for planting a cover crop. I like to go 10 to 12 miles an hour with the rolling stalk chopper because it's more aggressive that way and the way it hits the plants and knocks them down and chops them up. The hairy vetch and rye can be controlled by the rolling stalk chopper to a certain degree that depends on the maturity of the cover crop. If the hairy vetch is completely in bloom and the rye is pollinating, the rolling stalk chopper will give about a 90 to maybe 100 percent control with one rolling but you can roll it a couple times if you want to if you don't want to use herbicides but if you roll earlier before flower you have to use herbicide to help kill the cover crop. With a really good cover crop of hairy vetch and rye it can give you decent weed control. I've had some years where I have not sprayed and got good weed control and other years where I haven't so it just kind of depends on the weather and so forth. It is possible though to get some weed control benefits from the cover crop. This is a no-till vegetable transplanter. It is designed to transplant vegetables through a cover crop. The colders down here in the front slice through the heavy residue and place the transplant into the soil. We have heavy duty closing wheels at the back and the distance between the front colder and the closing wheels is as short as possible in order to make the plant attract right on the row like when we're rolling our contoured strips or our hill sides. It is possible to take a planter, a conventional planter and add a heavy duty colder in the front and maybe work with the closing wheels in certain situations where there's no stones or relatively easy situations that has worked or people have done that. But for all around no-till and especially when you have harder, tougher conditions you need to have a planter that's built for no-till vegetable transplanting. This is a seven and a half acre field of processing tomatoes and fresh market tomatoes in the background. Last fall I planted Harry Betts and Rye in here. This spring we came and rolled it down and no-till transplanted these tomatoes in here. And if you look down here you can still see the Rye, the residue of the Rye here and that helps to keep the tomatoes off the soil and keep them healthier. These tomatoes will be harvested with the machine and I'll come right back in as soon as possible and plant another cover crop. It may be Harry Betts and Rye, it quite possibly could be Crimson Clover. I am trying to incorporate or actually rotate my cover crops and Crimson Clover is basically the second best for nitrogen production to Harry Betts. We're in a field here of pumpkins and gourds that I no-till planted into a cover crop of Harry Betts and Rye that was rolled down. Because pumpkins are usually planted later in the spring the soil is warming up but I don't need to clear the row to plant it to warm the soil up like I do with sweet corn. Behind me is a university cover crop research plot. I test some things myself but I also cooperate with anyone else who's doing research in cover crops. I feel that's very important to try and test something that's new to see if it will work on a whole farm basis. I've also been a recipient of five SARA grants over the years and that has also helped me to be able to investigate some of the things that I thought could possibly work on my farm that would benefit other farmers as well.