 Right. I'm Frank Kutka. I am one of the co-coordinators of the NPSAS Farm Breeding Club, and I'm going to describe what we've been doing with our SAR research and education grant on cover crops. Soil health has certainly been a big topic of discussion the last few years. It's always been very, very important, but it's very nice to see that people are actively interested in the topic in a big way these days. If you go to any of the various field days and demonstrations about soil health, you find that healthy soil water soaks right in. It infiltrates unhealthy soil, water pools, and it runs off. If you ever see a slake test, a nice piece of dry, healthy soil put into water maintains its shape, even if it's wet. Unhealthy soil just dissolves, turns to mud, doesn't stick together. Cover crops are one of many different tools available to help improve the health and maintain the health of soils. I've been a lot of discussion about cover crops all across the region the last few years, a lot of field days, demonstrations, and so forth, especially of multi-species mixtures. NPSAS got interested in this, not only because of this opportunity for sustainability, but also for the seed selling opportunity. All of these cover crops are just going to be planted. No crop is harvested, so it's sort of a one-way trip for a lot of seed. It might be a great opportunity for folks who want to raise the seed to sell for other farmers to maintain their soils. One of the species that's of great interest in the area is radish, especially daikon radish. Those are the radishes that make gigantic roots. This is a seedling with the characteristic heart-shaped cotyledons, so you can tell if you've planted radish that it's present. Daikon radish moves right along, it starts to put out these penately compound leaves, kind of feathery and long. Eventually it starts to grow a root, which is long and deep rather than round and red, and a rosette. So when you're going to feel it'll look a bit like this. So before they bolt they just make this big flat plant with a big root underneath. Roots can look like so, and they will definitely crack and open the soil. They will help pull apart compacted zones to some degree. They pull up a lot of nitrogen and concentrate it into a form that will readily be released to the following crop. It's a very interesting cover crop species. But there have been some problems with seed. What could be the problem? Well, radish gets sold as radish VNS a lot of times, and something has happened. Folks have planted radish seed in their mixtures, and instead of finding great big daikon radishes they've found lots of little red cherry bell kind of radishes, because they're just sold as radish. It's the same species. And here's Jay, if you're giving a marvelous presentation. And in the background of this field we've got all this radish flowering. Don't want radish flowering in your field, because if you leave it long enough it will go to seed, and now you've got a new weed species in your field. It's a great weed. So we don't really want it to do that. We decided we would try to find radishes that made big roots really fast and were late bloomers not likely to go to seed in the wrong time frame. We did know that you could grow this plant, although it is a biennial. It's normally grown where you planted in late June or early July. Let it make this great monstrous root, which you'd harvest and eat, because it's actually a food crop. The following year it would bloom. However here our winters are cold enough it kills the radish out, so that doesn't work. But if you plant the radish very early in the growing season there's enough cold for most varieties to actually bolt and produce seed later on the same year. The problem is trying to find those that don't bolt too early. We want those that will actually still make seed, because there are some that just really don't want to flower. So we were trying to find what would work. What would make a good root fast and flower at the right time so we could produce seed here and not have radish going to seed when it shouldn't. We've got folks working several different locations. South Dakota is where we got started. We've got a partner working with us in Wisconsin and the summer we will be partnering with some folks planning some demos in the early county area of Central North Dakota. Emily Stiglmeyer got us started, Selby, South Dakota. She grew 56 different varieties which got rated for how quickly they grew and how nice big roots they grew in planted late season. We especially liked eight. Emily's holding her very favorite one which is a Nepalese version. Dicon radishes from Asia and actually the varieties we liked were mostly from Japan, India, and Pakistan and Nepal. I've had some issues with radish though. Here's a Stony Acres Farm CSA in Wisconsin where the radish got increased. We've had some problems figuring out how to grow this plant and make selections the way we wanted to do it. The first time we planted them we got these nice little roots because the plants were planted late but we didn't find a way to easily store those over the winter. Root storage is a big deal if you're going to have a plant that's going to grow a great big root and then flower later because if you plant it in spring to get seed you never see a big root develop it just bolts right away. So how do you tell which one really does the whole thing? It has really been dogging us trying to figure out which radish is going to work but we have at least several varieties. We know make roots the right time. We took remnant seed of those. Katrina has increased those so we've got a pound or two of that seed which we're going to hope to increase further. So ongoing work with radish. First off we want to figure out if we can actually store immature roots rather than fully mature roots and still plant them out the next spring so we can intermate selections the right way and make things move forward. Don't know if that'll work yet. This year we'd like to do some variety demonstrations so we will plant a group of different varieties and small strips in Minokin. Perhaps we can find some other locations as well so that farmers can see the degree to which some of the varieties actually vary because they do some are really quite impressively different. We're going to increase and do some initial selections with our new breeding population. I think it's got some real potential for growing big roots and improving the soil and then field days so farmers and gardeners can come see what we're doing and see how the process works and take part because what we're trying to find is a process that any of us can work with on farm to not only grow the seed but also continually improve it. All right now I'm going to switch to our other cover crop species because our project has two species to work with. This one is one you if you ask people about cow peas a lot of times they'll tell you about these sort of hard ground green peas that you grow for feed but that's not cow pea that's just a field pea. Cow pea is a different species. It's an African species commonly grown in the south where it's called black eyed peas because their varieties frequently have little black eyes. Yeah why don't you go ahead and pass that around. Cow pea looks like this out in the field. It's been a part of a lot of mixtures because cow pea is very drought tolerant and very heat tolerant. It doesn't really like cold very much but if it's hot and dry it's really what you want growing. Plants come up they look like this pretty similar to most other legumes and then they start to diverge a little bit. You can still tell this is related to a bean but the plants a little bit funkier looking. Some of these are very compact and look like a nice bush bean and some of them sort of range all over the place and doesn't quite look like a vine but it doesn't look like any legume you've seen some days but they are getting used in cover crop mixtures. Now in places where it's really cold and they're going to be planted late not so much because late planted cow pea when the nights are really cold they don't really do as well but for things that are planted earlier especially when it's going to go through the heat of the summer cow peas are still frequently included in those mixtures when you can afford it because they grow pretty well so this is sorghum sedan with cow peas underneath. Cow peas aren't cheap and if you want to plant 30 or 40 pounds of the acre for a solid stand it costs a few bucks and if you want to throw it in the mixture it's not always the cheapest thing to throw in compared to clovers or other things so we think if we could grow cow peas seed here we might be able to do it and get a slightly more reasonable price for varieties that we knew would grow well in our environment. You know just bringing up cow peas from Texas or Mississippi you know how's that going to do in South Dakota? I don't know it's hard to say so we want to find some things that we know will work and that we can produce the seed and maybe get some reasonable price and add some extra seed enterprises for NPSS members. Well there were some doubters and I completely understand why there were some doubters as to whether or not we could do this but we already knew there were some cow peas that we could at least get to mature whether they are going to be great for cover crops or really yield much anybody's guess but we knew we could get some to mature because we'd grown them in the garden already and done this. Also University of Minnesota had a cow pea breeding program for some years they closed that down because it just wasn't that much interest but they released a few varieties so it was clear this could possibly work just maybe not with all those fabulous southern black IP varieties we'd have to see. So we did one of what's sort of become our standard mode of operation we decided to get about a hundred different varieties and do a quick screen. So I don't know how many of you've ever gone to the USDA genetic resources information network website. It's really fun if you're interested in different varieties because they have a database of all the varieties USDA has for all the crops around the world in their collection. Thousands and thousands and thousands of varieties of all kinds of plants. So we searched through and found about a hundred so it's 96 that looked promising from all over the world. Anything that seemed like it was early blooming and maybe would stand up okay. Not just all those crazy viney things. And we screened them in 2012 for I guess to our credit we did get some seeds back and as a point of graciousness to the doubters most of them didn't make seed for us. Out of 96 we got ourselves about 15 or 16 that made seed that was you know alive and you know at least 85 or 90 of them or you know about 85 of them just really didn't go anywhere. I'm doing a math wrong there. Anyway most of them just came up and they didn't bother to bloom you know they're just never going to make it. Day length is wrong everything's goofy it's too cold but even late planted we got some. And we sent those seeds down to Puerto Rico over the winter to increase so we could start doing some small plot evaluations. So this is what the farm in western Puerto Rico looks like where they did the first grow out. It's very nice to be able to do this because otherwise it would take extra years. So having a winter nursery means you save a season every year to grow out every year that's just awesome. Flights to San Juan are only five hundred bucks. Here are the study sites where these small plot evaluations are going to take place. So Dickinson in Carrington North Dakota, Beresford South Dakota and gosh I can't remember the name of the town right now I think Arlington perhaps just north of Madison Wisconsin. So university partners all around really great folks to work with all across the region to find out regionally can we make cowpea work in some way. Where might it go? And here's where the farm is in western Puerto Rico if you ever get down that way. So here's our cowpea trial in 2013. I've passed or had some of our friends here pass around some of the information so you can see some of the results for that trial. We had 21 varieties I think that year. So we had a number of checked varieties and then these other PI numbers for the varieties from all over the world that we used. You can see the cowpeas there in July coming along all right. Here they are in North Dakota. Looks sort of like a soybean with sort of pointy leaves. After we evaluated them we got the data pulled together from across these different sites. Pass it out to the NPSAS membership many of whom didn't find a big table of data all that useful but that's just how it sometimes comes and you just make do with what you got. So we had to choose a smaller number to set forward for the following season. So I sent about a dozen down to Puerto Rico again where Brian works that's that's his his workplace. I'm quite jealous. I'd be loving to work there in January. Later in spring it looked like this. We got about 25 or 30 pounds back for each of our varieties that went out to the fields in 2014. Really good yields. You can see some of the differences in color and plant shape and all. Lot of seed came back. This is one of the red varieties. They vary quite a bit in color. We've got samples of most of them in the FBC Talking Lounge if you want to come by and take a peek sometime. We do have one that's it's not a black eyed pea it's sort of a purple eyed pea and the others have all sorts of different colors. These peas full holes. We learned about a new kind of bug with this project the cow pee weevil. So I get all these seeds at my house in Dickinson. So Brian ships them from Puerto Rico up to me in Dickinson. They go out in my garage where I've got some shelves and then you know we go down the garage and hear something. What the heck is that noise? It's coming from these bags. Open up this bag. Shot full of bugs. Bugs are scraping out of these seeds and scraping through the plastic bags. Hundreds of these little black weevils in my garage. This is our little friend cow pee weevil. I got hundreds of them to sweep up. We learned that we can kill these little guys without having to spray the seed or put something horrible on there if we freeze them. So once the seeds dry we can freeze it for a few weeks and when the seed comes back this year, because we got cow pee down there right now, we're going to freeze it for about a month and hopefully not have any more cow pee issues or cow pee weevil issues. These weevils are in the USA, the rest of the USA. Puerto Rico is in fact the US protectorate so it's considered our country. Don't have to do any importation documents to go back and forth. Anyway these guys are in California and all across the South. I expect they could be here too if they could over winter. We didn't really want to bring them up here to find out so we're going to get these guys all dead and not think about it again. Once we're done with Puerto Rico, no more weevils coming in my garage. Here's Pat Carr at Steve's Linger's Field during the Field Day at the Carrington Station this summer. Cowpeas grew a lot more slowly this year because it was really kind of chilly. But at Carrington anyway plants did eventually get some size to them, look pretty solid. That's organically managed by the way so when it sees Steve's winger shake his hand. In Wisconsin this is what Aaron Silva's plots looked like this spring so just coming along and then later on in the summer quite a riot of growth. So in some parts of the Midwest cowpea looks like a pretty solid grower. Some of the varieties are really pretty. This is a plant grown for food so there are some alternative options besides cover crops perhaps. We did see some motor just fine even though it was so cold. Pat Carr out in Dickinson, North Dakota really had trouble with it because although everyone likes to think it's warmer out west it does sometimes get very much colder at night and when things are drier things grow more slowly so we really struggle to grow things and this year he didn't get too much to mature. Most of it died before maturing. So a lot of things were pretty slow, slow to flower, slow to set. Some of the plants are very compact and upright, very interesting to see. And then this one Red Ripper which is one you can actually buy commercially from further south. In Wisconsin it actually set seeds but in the Dakotas it just grows and grows it never sets seeds. So for a cover crop it's awesome but as far as one that we could produce not so much so it's still be right where we're at right now. So I'm going to show you what all of our plots looked like. So bear with me you're going to walk through the Carrington site. These are all organically grown so I'm just going to cut that off because I can talk to you live. Just introducing here the fact that we're trying to find cowpeas that we can grow as a cover crop and produce seed in the Dakotas, Wisconsin and the rest of the upper Midwest. Some of them look pretty promising. We've been doing small plot variety trials now with university partners. And the purpose of the video is to walk you through the plot so you could evaluate them. So in your hands you have the 2014-2013 table on second page which explains what data we've got and now you can also see these. So first gray speckled palapai from Botswana, Botswana by the way, Southern Africa and that's what it looks like. Not the most erect variety, not the earliest variety but pretty growthy. Okay this next one's from South Africa. This is a thing that Steve Swinger and I have really enjoyed about cowpeas. Some varieties just put all the pods right on the top. So you can tell how they're doing and how they're going to yield because all the pods are right there for you to see. Here's one from Hungary. This one isn't quite as upright, doesn't have the pods quite as high up. Davis pea is a California variety because California is huge for these kind of plants. It looks kind of shaggy and all yields like crazy. A much thicker, more robust plant overall. Jackson purple hull is one of the pretty ones. I think that's the one that has purple eyed white peas. So if you see anything you like go ahead and take notes on on your table there. And I wanted you to be able to understand what all the plants have been doing along the way. This is another purple hulled one. Not quite as erect but again the pods are way up high. Tanzania that's in East Africa. This one isn't looking quite as happy, quite as fast macturing. Macture is fine further south in the region but North Dakota is perhaps a little bit tough. India also grows some cowpeas. This variety is from India. Somewhat smallish seeds. I'm not sure. Madras I think is southern India. I'm not really that geographically gifted I remember. That one's really tight and upright. Very compact. A couple more from Botswana. Botswana is a dry place. Cowpeas do really well in hot dry places so you're not surprised they come from Botswana. The surprising thing is that they can grow here too. That's really been interesting to see. The first one from Botswana was a lot more upright and compact. This one's a little bit hairier. Hairier if you will just shaggy looking. And here's red ripper again. Red ripper is just I mean you can't even see the ground between the rows. It's just vining out all over the place but not a flower to be seen. So we put this out. Yep very good. We had put this out hoping people would help us evaluate these. We will have more field days this summer and we'll hope you come. So further evaluations with cowpeas. Eight varieties are down in Puerto Rico right now. Just getting planted. Should be getting that seed back for a rush planting in May. In 2015 our partners will evaluate these eight varieties in the Dakotas and Wisconsin. So we will have more field days and more data and we're going to try to figure out which is the best ones most likely to be both cover crop use and seed production for that cover crop use. We have more field days. Another meeting in the fall. We're probably going to put out some more videos so people can help evaluate these even if they can't get to the field days because we really want farmer input all along the way to make sure we have varieties that you really want to grow. We do wonder about other aspects of this. Some of these cowpeas are looking pretty decent. Now some of the numbers you see are pulled down a little bit because we had a lot of zeros from the Dickinson site this year for yield but cowpea yields have been varying between 800 pounds of the acre up to about 1500 pounds of the acre. So some of them yield pretty well. You can eat them. You can eat the leaves. You can eat the pods. You can eat the seeds. So maybe some of these would be good in the garden if nothing else. And you are invited to take part all along the way. Let us know what you think. The question was do we know anything about nitrogen fixation with these peas? We don't but the Wisconsin site, Aaron Silva, has rated them for nodule formation and those ratings are included on the data sheets that we just passed out. So if you read, I believe the rating is for a lower number has more nodules, a higher number was less good because number one was the best. But some of those data and all we have is preliminary data at this point. But some looked pretty likely to set nodules okay. What was the row spacing for planting? These were all planted out I think at 30 inch rows. Mostly because they're experimental. And for seed production, it would probably be wider rows like that for organic growers. For cover crop use, of course, it would be planted a lot more tightly. How would we use these with other crops? Well, the way farmers are using these and we're working off of what other folks are doing is why we decided to work on these. Radish and cowpeas both are part of multi species cover crop mixtures that are being planted all over the region. Radish especially for cool season parts of growth and the cowpeas especially for the hot part of the season. So if you're planting, say annual forage or some cover for going through mid summer, frequently cowpeas would be a part of that sort of a mix. And if you're planting something later, where it's especially going to be a graze or continued growth on into as late as November of radishes will be part of those kind of mixtures. And if you want to grow these for the garden to eat, because both of them make really good food, daikon radish gets planted late June, and you get monstrous roots to harvest in the fall and cowpeas you'd plant as soon as you're escaping the frost. So probably early June and pick whenever.