 I'm Angela Knuth and we're in Mead, Nebraska. I farm with my husband and two sons, and we're pretty much corn, sorority beans, wheat, and a little bit of alfalfa as we move some acres into organics. You know, we produce a crop from mid-April to around mid-October. The rest of that time that field is just sitting there doing nothing for us. So it made sense with all the talk of cover crops and the benefit of them to the soil to get those on our soil in our field so that hopefully down the road we'll be reducing our input costs. And then to pay for that seed in the year that we're planting those cover crops, we thought, well, cattle would be, you know, the perfect solution for that. My name is Ashley Conway. I'm a new faculty member at the Center for Agroforestry University of Missouri. Prior to coming here, I was working on my PhD with Mary Janowski at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We were approached by a local producer in Mead, Nebraska, looking for ways to diversify their large operation and incorporate livestock. They are not livestock producers. They didn't want to learn how to raise cattle. They didn't want to buy cattle. They didn't want to be really, they didn't want to become beef producers, but they wanted to diversify their income streams and capture some of the benefits of rye and maybe look at some benefits of grazing as well. We didn't want to raise any ourselves, but we thought we could get some neighbors or just cattle producers that are looking for grazing to extend their grazing to come on our land. And then so those months that we weren't in conventional row crop using that land, now we're putting cover in it and hopefully getting paid for grazing. It just, that's the whole mindset of it. It was just trying to use a resource that we had that was underutilized and making it more profitable. We designed this two-year study that got us their graduate student research grant around looking at ways to study a system where our on-farm producer, our cooperators, our producer cooperators could continue doing their traditional corn and soybean rotation. And then at the end of the fall harvest, whether they were planting or whether they had just finished harvesting beans or corn, we would plant a cereal rye and let it either germinate in the fall or just lay dormant depending on what the weather was going to do. And it would vernalize over the winter. We basically go to sleep, but then when spring started coming, that we would then sprout up and we'd have really lush green growth in those early spring days of March, April, May before we would graze that rye cover crop. And then kill it immediately before planting. So we wanted to know how much growth could we gain? How many grazing days could we do? Would the costs of implementing rye cover crop and then grazing it, would that, would those benefits come out as increased gain and would it measure out in the sense that could we gain more income by doing the extra work of planting the cover crop, grazing it, would that pay off in pounds of beef basically? You know, everybody's always worried about compaction with cattle and we were planting corn that spring. So we were a little nervous about compaction and how our corn seeding would go and we actually didn't have a single problem. It was more just weather delays than anything else but it turned out that crappier that those two fields, the corn harvest, the yield was as good or better than years we've had in the past. I have farm with my husband and actually he's the one that makes the final decision and he doesn't have exactly the same mindset I have. So it's been kind of a struggle to get him to get cattle, wanna put cattle back on and also just the money spent upfront for the seed on covers. He's not fond of that because there's not a return in 12 months with conventional. So it's been a struggle but we've got some neighbors that are doing organics and covers and grazing that. So now he's seeing that, so he's not the odd man out. So he's starting to warm up to it this fall. We're gonna put some, probably some rye in and see if we can find some neighbors that have cattle that wanna graze. What I love about this project was that it really was organically produced in the sense that we were approached by the canoes and they wanted to figure out how best to diversify their operation. And so it was really a cooperative kind of project. It was really designed around actual producer needs and we think that the information that we got from it is extremely practical for producers in the region who are also interested in looking at ways to diversify their cropping system productions.