 I'm Eileen Drescher. I own Old Turtle Farm located in East Hampton, Massachusetts. This is my assistant farm manager, David Shane. Old Turtle Farm is an 18-acre farm. We have 12 acres of cropland. We market mainly through a CSA with a little extra going to some local grocery stores. We have 146 shares this season feeding 227 families. Cover crops are a real important part of our farm. We keep half of our land in cover crop. We use it mainly for our fertility program since we don't use a lot of other types of fertility here on the farm. We also use it for weed suppression. We graze our layers on it. We have a flock of layers that we pasture on our cover crop throughout the season. They are free-ranged within an electric net that's moved every two weeks and housed in mobile coops that we move every day. We do a lot of bug control for us as well as create some fertility. We have a system whereby we have cover crop next to crop, so we use it for beneficial habitats as well. Our field space is divided into sections of 30 beds. There's a section of cash crop bordered by two sections of cover crop. This season those are rotated such that the cash crops are now in sections where there was some cover crop. Each of our sections contains 30 permanent beds. They're mostly 300 feet long by 45 inches in the center. We also keep these permanent beds exactly where they are. We use a spader and drive only on the pathways, work walk only on the pathways, so the beds always remain the same whether they're in cover crop or in cash crop. After our cash crop we would seed with rye and vetch or just rye as the season gets colder. Then the middle of next season, around July, that rye and vetch would be put down and put into a cover crop that would winter kill such as oats and peas or suedex. This section was in cash crop earlier in the season. It's now been spaded down and put into rye and vetch. We are on a permanent bed system so the pathways always stay in the same place. The bed is planted with cover crop. We keep the pathways clean so that we're able to find the bed the next year. We use a permanent bed system mainly to reduce compaction and to help maintain good source structure. We sow this the middle of August and we go by bed. So rye and vetch usually gets put down 5 pounds of rye and 2 pounds of vetch per bed. And since we go bed by bed we just mix the seed according to the number of beds we're going to put down at that time. This rye and vetch will be allowed to grow until it starts to head out and then it will be mowed. We usually have to mow twice for the rye and then allow the vetch to come back through and flower and we mow again for the vetch and then it will be spaded down and put into a winter kill cover crop such as oats and peas. This is the equipment we use for planting our cover crop. A simple drop seeder that we purchased from Market Farm Implement. It's made by Shaper Brothers. It's adjustable according to the size seed that you're putting down. We incorporate it with a basket weeder. We use a pipe on the back of the tractor that drags along the bed and that helps to create the compaction necessary for faster seed germination. This is a field of oats and peas. It was seeded in the mid-August after spading down rye and vetch. The beds are seeded to about 5 pounds of premixed oats and peas per bed. Any of the legumes that we put down we do inoculate them prior to seeding. The other part of our fertility system is compost. So we have to buy our compost in. It's rather expensive. So we have been using a lot of legumes in our cover crop and hoping to reduce the amount of compost we have to use. We've been experimenting with a combination of suedex and red clover planted after a cash crop. The suedex will winter kill and then the red clover will come back through in the spring and remain through the next season. This suedex was put in after cash crop the middle of August. The seeding rate is 3 pounds of suedex to 2 pounds of red clover per bed. Suedex gives us a lot of biomass and then the red clover gives us the nitrogen. And red clover is something that we can leave in throughout the next year. We do not have to till it down and put it into a crop that will winter kill because a couple times of mowing and by the following spring there's not so much left. It goes down very easy. After the suedex is winter killed, this is what the field will look like. The suedex was left in place. The red clover has been mowed four times through the season. It will be left here until spring when it will be spaded down and put into a cash crop. The timing of the planting of suedex is very important. This suedex was planted in the middle of August when it was still quite warm. This bed of suedex was planted two weeks later when it had started to cool off. So it's obvious there's going to be a substantial difference in the biomass created by the suedex. This section is an example of needing to respond to something that didn't work correctly. It was seeded into suedex and red clover last year. But this spring the red clover didn't come through very well. So in order to reduce our weed problem, we spaded the clover in and planted it into straight suedex at the end of May. We got a great stand of suedex and this has been mowed three times. It has created a very good weed suppressive situation.