 Well, good afternoon, and I hope you're not getting too hungry for lunch, but we'll try to keep things moving along So just a little bit about myself and the perspective I come from I currently live here in Columbia my background is in agronomy having grown up on a farm in Illinois and most of my research over the years has been with alternative Grains oil seeds and legumes, but I've also worked quite a bit with cover crops and then have had a chance to be involved in education and demonstration programs on fruits and vegetables and agroforestry and in some of those other areas, so What I wanted to do Ron Mocker asked me to talk a little bit about some different strategies for cropping systems that kind of Cover the spectrum for not just row crops, but also into the fruit and vegetable area And I just wanted to get a sense for for this audience Kind of whether you are raising row crops or vegetables or fruits Some of you may be doing a little bit of both So how many of you are raising some type of row crop like corn or soybeans or wheat any of you doing that? Okay, and how many of you are raising vegetables that commercially several okay, and any grazing fruits commercially? Okay, that just helps as I'm thinking about the remarks So I'm going to be touching on several different areas. I just kind of wanted to give you a clue what we're going to be talking about I was asked to talk just a little bit about how the USDA sustainable ag program might be of value to you And fit into this area and then crop rotations We're going to talk a little bit about specific practices in the area of tillage And this would apply to both field crops and vegetable or small scale a little bit on fertility and pest control And then where you might actually be able to get some financial assistance to try some new practices on your farm so first of all with the SAR The SARA program is a Program sponsored through the US Department of Agriculture. It's about 20 million dollars annually through the federal government Almost all that money goes out in the form of grants for different types of projects summer for research summer for education A lot of our money goes out directly to farmers to try new ideas on their farms And I'll come back to that at the end of my talk how if you're not familiar with that program a little bit More about how you might apply to that Because we do have a deadline coming up in this region in late November where you can get some funding for that From that program, but SARA sponsors work in a pretty wide variety of areas Those are kind of listed up there just to give you a feel It's kind of all over the board from energy to diversification soils nutrient management and so on One important thing you're probably seeing our SARA boosts here, but if you haven't please stop by We have a lot of publications. Most of those are available for free. I'm going to hand out one of those publications Which is on diversifying cropping systems, so if you could just kind of pass that around This publication is one I co-authored that was put out through the federal government and it's talks about Cover crops different alternative crops agroforestry just some different practices and then on the back page There's some links to different centers and programs that you can access more information either with a phone call or through the internet We also have through our website a number of Books you may have seen those at our booths But you can download these books for free or read them online for free Or of course you can if you want to actually have a print copy you can purchase that For a small cost and then increasingly we're putting some resources on the web in terms of videos and There's an online sustainable ag class and some other Resources that you may find a value Okay, so I wanted to talk a little bit about a number of different areas first of all with crop rotations If you're thinking whether it's vegetables or field crops This would apply to kind of any annual or biennial crop. We might think about what are some good strategies for doing that? I've had a chance over the years to experiment with a lot of different crop rotations and cropping systems And you know some of the things we think about a course or what's the best way to deal with weeds and insects and diseases? How can we best handle our soil nutrients with rotations and what kind of pest control options are in there? One that you're probably all familiar with but I just always remind folks of it is it's always good if we can rotate a Grass crop and a broadleaf crop. That's not always easy in a vegetable crop system. It's a little easier with row crops But that can be a good strategy in part for weed control But also because when you go from the broadleaf plants to the grass crops There are very few diseases that cross over between those two sets of Plant groups and there would be more insects that can cross over but even there a lot of the insects aren't going to cross between grasses and broadleafs I Like to try to get a winter annual into rotation with the summer annuals I'm going to talk quite a bit about cover crop strategies and that of course is a key way to do that But there may be other cash crops who can use and then if we're looking at vegetables There's a really good resource if you're not familiar with that was put out through the Northeast It's on sustainable cropping systems for vegetables. If you just Google sustainable cropping Vegetables strategies or something like that. It should pop up Verne Grubinger at University of Vermont to develop that resource aimed at farmers with some very specific suggestions about how to set up vegetable rotations and so on One thing he would talk about is, you know, think about moving whole groups of vegetables. So if you've got 40 different species of vegetables you're growing maybe group some together by botanical families or group them together by the type of the Part of the plant being harvested the time of the planting or cultural praxis or even specific pest problems So when I've grown large-scale demonstrations of vegetables We have done that we'll group the vegetables together five or six species and then move them as a block from year to year Okay, some cropping system strategies I'm just going to touch on some of these and then go into depth on the cover cropping and diversification But I wanted to just mention a little bit about strip cropping in some other strategies so strip cropping if you're not too familiar with it looking at the This region we mainly see this in the northern part of the Midwest if you've driven up through southwest Wisconsin You might see a landscape that looks like this photo I was up there a year ago in the fall and saw a number of farms that had kind of this type of appearance If we look a little closer what we're looking at with strip cropping and this again could apply to smaller scale production Is trying to take advantage of the edges of those cropping systems So of course corn is the taller plant, but here with the oats it's getting going early So the idea is it's taking advantage of the light and providing some soil erosion protection Early in the season now the soybean yield right next to the corn is going to diminish a bit But not as much as you'd think and then of course the outside row of the corn is going to have a better yield because it's Got more access to lights and nutrients right there next to the soybeans So the total yield in that type of system is higher than if we were just growing these in large blocks And the reason of course we don't see more of this is just the difficulties of on commercial farming Mechanically going in there with large-scale equipment the spraying and fertilizing and so on but it is still a very good practice And for smaller scale farmers I think it's a very good strategy to think about is how you can take advantage of the edge Benefits of growing different plants together and those of you doing vegetables are well familiar with this If we look at agroforestry Where we're combining trees and crops in a field, you know I grew up on a corn and soybean farm And we had very few trees in central Illinois and for my dad the trees were just something that ran the way you've all seen the strips of windbreaks that were planted back in the 1930s to provide wind erosion protection and we had a couple of Those on our farm and when I was in college was home one time on the farm my dad said well I've decided I'm going to take down the windbreak on our farm and I said well why and he said well It's hitting the combine and I said we'll just move the combine over a few feet He's like no no it's you know it's in the way of the combine So there have been a problem with farmers recognizing the value of trees in the landscape But agroforestry is trying to say they're not only an ecological value, but a cash value So some of these crops when we talk about agroforestry can provide an income while the the trees are maturing when we look at planting rows in between and we get better a combination of soil and water resource use when we're combining the trees with other plants and Improving the value of the land and I wanted to mention here in Columbia at the University There's the Center for Agroforestry if you're not familiar with that you may have gone to a presentation yesterday on elderberries But they have a tremendous set of resources on a wide range of not only agroforestry practices But specific plants that can be used whether it's pecans walnuts chestnuts elderberry and other types of plants L alicropping is one practice that they have been Encouraging in this region and some farmers are adopting it So you've probably heard of alicropping, but it's the strategy of planting rows of trees that are going to have cash value at Some point with other plants in between now this is showing something like soybeans in between the trees But really could be anything it could be watermelons It could be a pasture type or forage type species The idea is as the trees are getting bigger you're still getting some cash value from that land You don't have to just wait until five seven ten years in the future when that tree reaches its harvestable age Whether it be for lumber or nuts or whatever it might be and there's been some research showing that as you'd expect There's some beneficial aspects these crops because you're getting some biological diversity out there Benefit the trees and likewise those tree rows Especially if there's some living cover in there and provide some beneficial insects and other things that benefit the row crop So this is a strategy to think about and I've cooperated on some research with this It's a I think something we need to see more of in our region The agroforestry center also talks a lot about riparian buffers And there's quite a bit of funding available through the natural resource conservation service and RCS to put in buffers like this You can get funding under their environmental quality incentives program or equip or through their CRP program conservation reserve program Under what they call CP 22 and the idea is pretty obvious But you're coming in next to the crop field along that riparian buffer and planting a series of plants now The idea with having some woody's in there is they're going to have better root holding capacity Than just having grasses and I've seen this myself where you might have grasses along an area with moving water that it's still going to have Erosion compared to having woody plants. They're going to hold the soil in place better But there's other benefits we see like coming off pastures that those filter areas or of course going to capture some of the nutrients Keep those from getting into our water supplies and also provide Benefits for beneficial insects, songbirds and other things that we might be interested in So I want to turn next to cover crops and go a bit more in depth here You know, we're seeing more and more use on cover crops I've been to some recent cover crop Conferences and I hear the people selling cover crop seeds say their seed sales have been doubling the last couple of years each year There's a lot of farmers of all types that are adopting cover crops whether you've got two acres or two thousand acres and Just an explosion of interest in this area for good reason So obviously these can suppress weed growth But if we're looking at a legume cover crop they can provide a lot of nitrogen fixation And the great thing that I think is really helping drive the adoption now is you can for the first time these last few years Get some significant cost share payments from the federal government, especially through the NRCS equip program You could get here in Missouri typically around thirty five dollars an acre For the cost of planting the cover crop seeds so that can really help with making it more affordable to do When we look at cover crops, you know, you can kind of group them We can say there's a group that are the winter annuals and these are the ones that are primarily used as cover crops Some of them that could be used as winter annuals can also be used to spring cover crops And that's something that I think people don't pay quite enough attention to and then those of you that grow vegetables Are familiar with the fact there's also things that are warm season cover crops So I'm going to touch on some examples in each of these areas When I was growing up the cover crop that we used on our farm in combination with wheat was sweet yellow clover Now you don't see a whole lot of this today except maybe growing in some road sides But the advantage of sweet yellow clover was it would be over seeded into the wheat early in the spring The wheat seeding rate would be cut back just a bit and then after the wheat was harvested in the end of June or early July the sweet yellow clover would take off with the first rain that came And then it would grow well through the fall and be Usually in that that era mowboard plowed in the spring But today we would maybe use other probably use other control strategies But a tremendous nitrogen fixer and my dad swore on our farm that he could see years later Where he had had the sweet yellow clover in terms of improvements to the soil health One of my personal favorites today is crimson clover and this illustrates when we think about the botany of these plants We have to think about what is their true nature. So the sweet yellow clover the reason We don't see it used as much today as it's actually a biennial plant So it needs a whole summer to grow then it's going to live through the winter and another growing season Something like the crimson clover is what we'd say a true winter annual So it doesn't need much time to grow in the fall to get established or if we want a spring planet It's very quick to get established as more of an annual Whereas the biennials are going to spend more time getting the root system going So if you plant crimson clover on the same date that you plant sweet yellow clover either in the fall or the spring This the crimson clover is going to take off faster in most situations And one reason I like crimson clover besides the fact it's just such a beautiful plant is it is easy to control a lot of times you'll hear farmers that may be tried Harry vetch in years past and My experience with Harry vetch. It's a great nitrogen fixer. It's a very good smother Crop in terms of smothering weeds, but it's got a couple issues one is you may have heard that it can have hard seed What that means is that if you take a bucket of seed Only a few of those seed would germinate right away those that you plant some are going to persist in the soil over time And show up a year later or five years later even ten years later sort of like a weed seed bank now Our better varieties of Harry vetch are more geared to have fewer hard seed But it's still a bit of an issue that can be a weed down the road, especially for small-grain cereal producers The other problem with Harry vetch is it can be more challenging to kill it when you're ready to have your cash crop Sometimes I'll just use mowing as a strategy to kill a cover crop Well, Harry vetch is pretty tough to kill just by mowing it unless you get it exactly the right timing Whereas crimson clover. It's pretty easy to kill it by mowing at the right time or it's not too difficult if you're Actually using sprays to you control it that way Austrian winter peas has been another one that's gotten some attention in this area My own experience with Austrian winter peas is if you can get them established. They're a great nitrogen fixer They grow very fast. I've had trouble getting them to survive the winter on heavy clay pan soils But if you can plant them early enough in the fall that like any cover crop improves its odds of survival I've had actually better success planting them early in the spring like late March The other challenge was something like Austrian winter peas If your strategy is just to broadcast the cover crop generally the smaller the seed the better So that's another reason I like crimson clover. I planted some just in my vegetable garden a few weeks ago I just go to tell the soil and broadcast that I didn't worry about raking in or anything If I was planting Austrian winter peas in my garden I would have worked that into the soil because those larger seed you know like a pea again It needs better seed to soil contact. You've got to get it down into the soil Whereas that clover as a small seed will find those cracks and nooks in the soil and have a better chance of getting established One that's getting some interest from livestock farmers is the turnip rape seeds There's actually a group of plants that fall into this area The idea is you plant these in the fall and then you're going to get that turnip growing and your livestock and then come in and graze That late in the fall or through the winter cattle will Bite the top of it or they may paw down and try to dig it out of the ground depending on the soil conditions But it actually works quite well as a forage At a certain point in the fall the top growth makes for a good forage as well the leafy material But it generally most of the types of turnip forage will winter kill as we get into December in this area Now last winter we had a mild winter and it would have persisted farther into the winter But this has been one that's been a great interest to livestock producers and again. There's a variety of names of varieties that are being sold in this area the one that's probably the hottest tillage Crop for cover cropping overall is tillage radishes. Yes Yeah, the question was if you've got these turnip radishes Do you have to worry about any particular time not eating them? My understanding is the that you could go out there at any point and eat them But you're going to get the greatest value when that turnip has developed some size to it So you wouldn't want to go in too early in the fall There might be great vegetative growth But you want that turnip to reach some size so that you can benefit from the value of that and it's kind of Like a stored food going into the winter But again, there's a trade-off between grazing When there's some good green leafy growth still available versus when the turnips are full-size. Yes Well, that's a good point if they were Physically a certain size they could block the windpipe That's true and again It would depend on soil conditions how loose the soil was in our heavy clay soils They tend to just bite the tops of them rather than completely dig them out. But yes, that could be a problem Thanks for pointing that out Yes Yeah, that's a great question just to repeat it So the question is if you've got some vegetables that are in the same family Botanical family, which would be the brassicas in this case should you be concerned about that choosing a cover crop? That's a brassica member as well as your vegetable and that's a very good thing to be thinking about There's a few parts to that answer first of all a lot of the diseases that might be a problem in the summer growing season Are not necessarily going to infest brassicas in the fall like sclerotinia white mold will show up on some of our cool season brassicas Early in the summer, but it's not going to be infesting the plants in the fall So just because you had a brassica followed by a brassica won't make that disease worse now other diseases Could maybe be made worse. So it's always a good strategy to have some diversification there There's certain insects like the cabbage moss That will really attack these brassicas depending on the time of the year they're going like I see a big difference between Fall planted brassicas which don't have too much trouble with the cabbage moss and their larva versus the spring planted ones Like a spring canola that matures later than they just for some reason get hit a lot harder. So The insects it just depends on their life cycle if they're not around in the fall They're not building up then it may not be an issue, but in general, yes You'd want to be careful about Planning something that's in the same botanical family back to back My experience is usually you can get away with it for two or three Plantings, but if you're doing it year after year, that's where you really get into a problem. Yeah to a certain extent the earlier the better but When I say earlier, I mean like August is better than September and September is better than October But June is not better than August and the reason is because you can the plant may start flowering and then you gets cold And it just kills it outright. So you have to think about these are winter annuals They're designed to start growing in the fall not the early summer Okay, let's go on to a couple of others So the tillage radishes if you're not real familiar with those they have a thick tuber that generally will be about a foot long when they're planted in August or early September and The top growth in this region is going to die back during the winter now If you went far enough to the south they could over winter into the spring But a lot of grain farmers like this for two reasons one is that that tuber as it decays by spring Will provide an open channel not only for water to drain away like if you're planting corn the next spring, but also it Allows that corn root to get down into the soil faster and it can even help open up a little bit a clay pan soil The other reason is that because that top growth is dying back It's only growing in the fall and so you don't have to control it in the spring if you're out there Planning a very early crop corn or an early vegetable. You don't have to take any steps to control that It's died in the fall, but that's the disadvantage It doesn't provide any erosion protection late in the winter or early in the spring So some people will pair this with something else that is a spring annual one of the more interesting approaches I've seen on a grain farm. There's a farmer in Ohio named Dave Brant that's well known in cover crop circles And what he will do is using global positioning systems on his tractor He'll plant a row of tillage radishes and then 15 inches over he'll plant something like Austrian winter peas And then another 15 inches over another row of the tillage radishes And he'll come back and precisely plant the corn right where that tillage radish was because in his no-till system The Austrian winter pea will keep growing and provide some green cover and some nitrogen fixation in the spring But that tillage radish will have died and where that top growth was will kind of create a sort of a strip till just using a biological method of that tillage radish and again that radish itself by Dine will have created a root channel to help drain away the moisture and get the corn growing So you could replicate that on a vegetable system more by hand but there's different ways to kind of use these to be effective and It's just really hundreds of thousands of acres of these have been planted the last couple of years because they've really been quite popular Okay, so the question was with these brassicas like tillage radish Do you need fall nitrogen to get them to grow and the answer is they're going to grow better if you put on fall nitrogen? But most people are not just from a cover crop standpoint now with a fall brassica that is a cash crop like canola Which I'll show you in a minute then yes, you'd probably want to put on some fall nitrogen I probably would not with tillage radishes or turnip radishes and there's some thinking that these are good to plant also because They're going to scavenge the nitrogen that may be left over at the end of the growing season So you get up in like the Red River Valley of North Dakota. They're planting a lot of tillage radishes because they have high water tables They worry about their nitrates that are left from the corn getting into their water supply And so they're planting those tillage radishes to grab some of that nitrogen and hold it in an organic form Rather than letting it get into their water supplies. Oh I wanted to say a word so the other strategy we're seeing more and more of is mixing cover crops together One that I've used some is is hairy vetch and oats I mentioned some of the challenges of hairy vetch if you've grown hairy vetch, you know It's kind of a low-growing plan if you grow it by itself It just kind of forms a mat in the fall. It won't get very big But then in the spring the tendrils will get quite long They could get four or five feet long But by itself it will just kind of form this mat on the soil which is great for smothering weeds But just doesn't get very tall the idea with putting the oats in there as they get more growth in the fall than the Vetch so they're going to help hold the soil better than the vetch alone And they give a little bit of structure for those vetch to grow to grow on now the oats are going to winter kill So the other strategy some people use is to use winter rye instead if you want something that's proved provide that scaffolding into the spring So if you've seen a field of winter rye was out in one this spring, you know The rye can get four even five feet tall depending on how long you let it grow and those hairy vetch tendrils will Just go right up it so you can get a very thick mat of material It's tremendous biological growth a lot of nitrogen fixation But it's a challenge to control it because you've got this huge mass of plants out there So people are looking at this as a strategy if you are not going to till in your cover crop This is a roller crimper system. You may have seen this before but these kind of came into pop Yes, can the question is can hairy vetch be used as a forage for livestock? I haven't heard of much use of it in general the legumes as a whole make good forages because they have a high quality protein But people are not using as much hairy vetch I suspect it probably has a little bit to do with palatability compared to some of the clovers and so on But I just don't know for certain what its potential is in that area So these roller crimpers these were this idea was developed by the rodeo research Center in Pennsylvania and The idea is rather than just rolling cover crops flat Which people have been trying for years that you have a a metal edge if you look at these like this one there's a Probably like a quarter inch thick metal That's maybe five or six inches wide welded onto that roller and the idea is that it's not just flattening the rye Or the clover, but it's also crimping the stems and so by doing that that sharp edge Cramping the stand not cutting it it breaks the vascular tissue tissue in the stem and keeps that cover crop from continuing to grow And the idea is if you put that on the front of the tractor like you have here Then you can have a planter on the back They've got just a little bitty research planner, but I've seen farmers doing this with Four row planners and other approaches Turn that back on So this can work pretty well, but the problem is if you've got a really thick mat of cover crop It may have trouble crimping all the way through it So you have to get a lot of weight on there. You have to be pretty timely with when you're doing it I've seen it work quite well I've also seen it fail where it doesn't completely kill the cover crop and then you've got to find another method. So yes Well mowing is a longtime strategy for cover crop control in a general rule of thumb is you want to mow after Reproductive growth has started most plants of these winter annuals if you mow them before they're flowering They're going to regrow just like your lawn grass If they've started flowering things change in the plant and they're more likely to be killed by mowing and the farther They get into the reproductive growth the more likely they will be killed by mowing But that's a general rule of thumb and I have found it doesn't always work It depends on the species like Harry vetch can be flowering and you can mow it and you may or may not kill it Depending on how dried is whereas crimson clover once it starts flowering. It's pretty easy to kill it by mowing. Yes Well again in the past people would just use any sort of regular roller and roll them flat and it can work again If it's in reproductive growth like a common one for vegetable growers was they would grow foxtail millet Which has a lot of different names called German millet a Hungarian millet and if you waited till it started to get seed Formation and rolled it flat with any sort of roller it generally wouldn't regrow But these roller crimpers do a better job because again, they're crimping that stem Breaking the flow of nutrients and water in the stem to keep it from regrowing Yes You can disk it the idea with this is that you are keeping you're doing two things by not doing any tillage You're preserving a no-till environment and all the benefits that may have so preventing erosion Keeping any root channels that earthworms have provided or root that have grown there So you're just not disturbing the soil so you allow better soil structure to be in place in a no-till environment The other thing is when you go in and disk You know you're creating a rough environment with that residue mixed in with the soil And it's not a very good planting surface unless you just get three or four times if you've got a lot of residue The idea with putting a planter on the back if it's pushing that cover crop residue forward And then you're planning right after it if you think of something like rye that's tall It'll push it forward and then that planter will come along kind of plant in between those stems And so it keeps from pinning the residue down into the planting furrow And it just works much better to get good seed to soil placement Whereas if you've got a real rough surface with plant stem sort of half mixed in the soil It's hard to plant into that unless you've done a lot of tillage So think about these roller crimpers now cover crops I've kind of shown them in the context of growing something like corn or soybeans But even if you've got fruit crops people have been finding more and more like whether it's peaches apples Whatever it may be blueberries that putting a cover crop out there It doesn't necessarily have to be right next to the stem of the peach tree But you're providing a habitat where you're getting more beneficial insects that can help You just are providing a more diverse environment You might get some nitrogen fixation if it's a legume so cover crops can be a value in most of our cropping systems So just some general pointers You know you want to try to minimize the cost of establishment So a lot of larger scale farmers will do that by flying the cover crop seed on or they'll use some big Fertilizer spreader or herbicide spreader that's been modified to spread it Some people have even put spreaders on the back of their combine to spread the cover crop seed But if you're doing vegetables on a smaller scale again, if you're using a small seed like a clover I usually will just broadcast it on to if I'm doing tillage onto a roughened soil surface If you've got a bigger seed like a Austrian winter pea Then you're probably going to have to use a drill or somehow work that into the soil like discing it in it depends on the soil condition and Weather forecast so again like with crimson clover if I've got a rough if I've tilled and I've got a rough enough soil surface I often will just broadcast it and let it set and let rain do the work if If it doesn't look like it's got a rain for a while I might roll it if especially if there's some moisture in the soil and then it'll press the seed into the Soil a little bit and take advantage that moisture and often start growing Without any further rain. So it just kind of is a judgment call depending on your conditions Yes uh-huh Yeah, so the the question is about enter cropping or enter planning where you're growing two different species kind of side-by-side That could be in row arrangement and field crops or with vegetables could be any sort of number of planning I'll show you a slide later of a research trial on that, but just to answer your question In general, it's a good strategy because again if you think why weeds show up in a field It's take advantage of gaps in space and time nutrients of water light That that field crop or cash crop is not taking advantage of that's why these weeds get in there So if we can put something of value to us to replace that weed Maybe height or nutrient or water Get two or three species then we're going to have less weeds and take better use of the resources that we have But having said that There can be problems. So if tomatoes are by far your most profitable crop and you're putting something else in there Right around them Then maybe you're suppressing your tomato yield to the point that it's not made up by the value of that second thing You're planting or if it's just a legume to provide nitrogen fixation Yes, you might get a little nitrogen going to the tomato plant But again, it may be so aggressive that it competes with it for water and nutrients So in general, it's a good strategy and people are experimenting more with us all the time But you just got to be a little careful with Creating too much plant competition, I guess Okay, a couple other things to think about with the fall color covers again establish them early Some of them you can get away with planting quite late like Right now in early november. There's relatively few choices, but winter rye would work pretty well It's probably the latest one you can plant You could if we had a few more weeks of warm weather do one or two of the clovers like crimson clover But generally I stopped doing legumes by about the second week of october in this area central missouri Wheat could be put in late in october In most years, but again, it's getting a little marginal these brassicas They'll grow but you're going to get your most benefit if you plant them in late august early september So as I look at what's happened people are finding more and more ways to push the planting early So if they've got Corn or soybeans they're overseeding rather than waiting until the crop comes out of the field But with vegetables, of course, it may be a little easier If you do use winter rye be aware that rye you may have heard this has certain allelopathic properties That's one reason it's been popular as a cover crop because the allelopathic means it has chemicals in the rye plant That suppress the growth of certain other plants not everything It works very well with soybeans because the soybeans are totally unaffected by the winter rye So if you plant soybeans after the winter rye is grown it won't hurt them as all Whereas it will suppress certain weeds like some of the pig weeds and other broadleaf weeds But you just have to think about which things it's going to be allelopathic to And then control of the cover crop is the big thing I think a lot of first time cover crop growers they get surprised how difficult it can be to control that cover crop It's actually not too hard. Just you want to have a strategy in place Now mow it or till it after reproductive growth has started Or you know, if you are spraying Even spraying roundup If you use roundup, it doesn't always work depending on the time of spraying So you just got to think about when you're going to do these things and how it's going to fit with your crop And then if you're using a legume any of the clovers or vetchers or peas You are going to get some nitrogen benefits. So of course that kind of reduced the amount you have to put on later Okay, what about a summer cover crop? One plant that I've worked with quite a bit is buckwheat I work with it more as a cash crop for farmers But it's certainly used by some vegetable growers, especially as you go out east You find a lot of vegetable farmers in places like Maryland Ohio using buckwheat as a summer cover crop There's a couple reasons for that one is it's very fast growing You can get from this stage to this stage in about three weeks And it's pretty good at smothering the weeds during the summer because it's a fast grower Beekeepers love it because it flowers for a long period. So it's a good source to supply Food for the bees It also is known that it has a mycorrhizal Associations in the soil that are pretty good for a summer crop So the thinking is that it makes phosphorus more available to a following crop The russians where buckwheat is native In their research have Indicated that there's good advantage to making phosphorus more available in the soil And then when we look at buckwheat, it also provides some increase in soil tilt or just general soil properties by growing this as a cover crop So that's an option for a summer cover crop But it's also a cash crop option if you're trying to intensify your cropping system by Planting something later and we have some organic grain farmers in Missouri that will grow buckwheat as part of their system Yeah Yeah, so that's a good question. So does buckwheat have any hard seed again hard seed means And you plant a group of seed that some of those aren't going to germinate right away They're going to stay in the soil germinate in a later year buckwheat Shouldn't have a hard seed in it now you might see a few volunteers in later years But that's usually because a plant came up produced some seed and grew again Most of our domesticated plants generally do not have Any hard seed that's part of what's happened during their domestication because we want them to germinate when we plant them But you did something you need to think about now the buckwheat will volunteer pretty readily as you noted So if you grow it let it grow go to seed then you're going to get a flush of it again at some point It could be that growing season if you get enough rain and the soil is still warm Probably 70 degrees or above or the next spring, but if it does volunteer the next spring I found it's pretty easy to control it by mowing or tillage but yeah Right, so you know with a cover crop like buckwheat again Let it start flowering but then mow it pretty quickly before the seed set starts to happen That would be the way to control it As a cash crop I could talk to you a lot about that but there there are some market opportunities Of course it's used for buckwheat pancakes and other things a lot of it goes overseas to japan They use it in noodles and so on Another grain I was going to show you just briefly is amaranth just thinking about diversification options This would be a little more suited for a row crop farmer than on a vegetable farm But I have known vegetable farmers that have grown it Normally the grain varieties are grown just for seed, but you can pick the leaves and eat them or use them They'd be similar to a spinach There are vegetable types that are grown specifically for their leaves It's a pretty diverse plant. You can see some crimson colored ones and some yellow flowering ones back here in the back This was a plant that was grown by the In mexico a long time ago. They when the spanish came in the conquistadors that kind of suppressed the use of amaranth So the Aztecs were probably the peak users of amaranth and our human history But it's starting to make a little bit of a comeback and part of that is because of its nutritional value It's got very Good levels of protein and a very well balanced protein plus some other nutritional benefits So this one's gotten some interest That has made it a good alternative crop canola You can the grain types are not quite as good for leaf use as the vegetable types Like the vegetable types are very popular in west africa and the caribbean In other words the grain types are popular in east africa india A little bit in europe here in the u.s. Mexico and so on Canola, you may have heard that canola is kind of a some people in sustainable ag circles say well This is a genetically modified crop. Well, that's true of the spring canola is the winter canola That we would grow here in missouri is not gmo Although there is you know, these companies keep coming up in the new gmo varieties now There is a roundup ready winter canola being grown in oklahoma, but not in missouri So canola has been a good alternative crop for some farmers because it is again a winter annual We're planting in the fall and harvesting it in june So it's been a good alternative to winter wheat often more profitable to winter wheat It's been good for dealing with nematodes I didn't mention this earlier, but a lot of the brassicas as cover crops or cash crops Will suppress certain nematodes in the soil so potato farmers like the brassicas Because they help deal with the root knot nematode and potatoes Soybean farmers have interest in them because they can suppress some of the soybean nematodes They don't completely eliminate them, but they suppress them and make them less of a problem There's over a million acres grown in the u.s. But we're still importing a lot of canola It's been very popular because of the type of oil it has If we look at the different types of vegetable oils This first line is canola followed by safflower flax sunflower corn Soybean if you look down here at soybean, it's 15 saturated fats. Look at coconut oil 91 saturated fats You may not know this but when you went to the movie theater years ago and had popcorn at the movie theater It was almost always made in coconut oil Well, guess why they changed it that 91 saturated fats and coconut oil And now nearly all movie theater popcorn is made with canola oil So they went to the opposite end of the spectrum something very low and saturated fats But as we've gotten a little more knowledgeable about our Fatty acids we've learned it's not just saturated fats. It's also if you've got a lot of polyunsaturated fats That's good. So that's high in canola And then I wanted to mention this orange bar, which is the alpha linoleic or omega 3 fatty acids I'm going to come back to that in a couple slides about flax because you can see here that flax is the one that's got a tremendous amount of the omega fatty acids And then sunflower if you look at it, it's pretty good But it's not Doesn't have much of the oleic acid now you might ask but why does oleic acid matter if you're making a cracker or a potato chip You need a oil that is stable for cooking that it doesn't go rancid or have problems or make for a potato chip that has a short cell flight So oleic acids are good And so I'll show you how they've changed that with sunflowers. So let's look at flax. We've got some organic grain farmers in Missouri growing flax It's an early cool season crop This is the the flower structures what we call the bowls that have seeds in them It's a grown a lot like spring oats Historically, it's been grown all over the eastern u.s And it has traditionally been used in non food markets But the recent interest has been as a food because of these omega 3 fatty acids So there are whole books written about the omega fatty acids They help with cardiovascular health It's kind of an alternative to taking the statins if you've got high levels of cholesterol or certain triglyceride issues Some people the arthritis or advice to take you have more omega fatty acids in their diet Can help with neurological issues cognitive emotional health So all this has stimulated interest primarily in fish But a lot of people don't know that flax is also very high in omega fatty acids So that's why you see when you go in like wall greens and if you look for fish oil pills You probably see near it in the shelf flax seed pills because they're also high in the omega fatty acids And I just wanted to mention normally flax is a brown seeded crop But there are new varieties that are golden seeded. They're exactly the same nutrition same omega fatty acids But it just has to do with appearance so people like a golden seed in their bread or their breakfast cereal more than a brown seeded one What about sunflowers another oil seed sunflowers are one of our very few native cash crops native here to this region Very vigorous do a great job smothering out weeds. This is a field of them grown as a double crop after wheat They they are high in oil like canola Very drought tolerant. So in a year like this one the sunflowers would do a lot better I've seen that side by side with soybeans and corn that the sunflowers will tolerate dry conditions much better Lots of different types. There's the type we use for snack food Most of them are grown are oil seed types And these have been developed to be higher through conventional plant breeding and those oleic acids And then new varieties for ornamental and I wanted to specifically mention the ornamental for small acreage Production you might not realize how many ornamental types there are a lot of people don't know you can get orange and red Sunflowers instead of just the normal golden ones You may have seen these types in photos the teddy bear type vango painted those And johnny's selected seeds if you ever look at their catalog is a great source of a lot of these ornamental ones They even have types of sunflowers that don't produce any pollen. You might say well, what does that matter? Well, if you put a base of sunflowers on a table Especially if you got a tablecloth on it that pollen is going to stain the tablecloth or just make a mess So these pollenless types are great for cut flowers. You may well, okay cut flower market Well, if you normally we plant sunflowers at the rate of about 20 000 plants in an acre So if you can sell each flower for two dollars, that's 40 000 dollars from an acre now you're never going to sell 20 000 flowers But the idea is if you blend that in with some of your vegetables or other crops use a few different planting dates A few different varieties you can generate some nice income. It's pretty easy to harvest same thing with bird seed We've I've known some farmers on a small acreage They'll take a half acre Cut the whole head of the oil seed type when it's dried down and sell those heads for two dollars At the farmers market and the people just stick them on their fence or nail them to the side of a shed And use it as a kind of a living bird feeder So you can make a pretty good profit off a quarter acre of sunflowers if you do your marketing work Okay, a couple on legumes. These are cow peas If you wanted to these you could grow them in vegetable garden or commercially in a larger scale Lots of different varieties of cow peas These do well on sandy soils, but can grow on clay and they're a warm season Crop that'll be grown later in the growing season Dry edible beans are another one Lots of different market classes the one that probably does the best in Missouri or the black beans But on a vegetable level you can grow any of them. They're just going to be kind of short If you're combining them with a grain combine the black beans will be the best. Here's some black beans Look pretty similar to soybeans in the field So what do you do with these on a small scale? Well, here's a farmer near Indian Naples that grew them and cleaned them up and sold them in bottles like this for soup mixes or other uses Adding value through processing packaging can be quite important with these. So this is the farmer right here He just has about 20 acres of crops He farms part-time. He bought a cleaning machine to clean his beans Then he bought I think I've got a slide. Yeah, this is his little bagging thing So he puts a paper bag on here slides over and this little thing sows the bag shut So just working by himself. He can handle quite a few bags of these clean dry beans And sells them into local co-ops and so on. What about regular soybeans? They do great in our environment Can we do anything with them on a small scale? Yes, we can edamame soybeans. I'm sure you've heard about them You might not realize how popular they're getting if you look in the frozen food vegetable section A lot of our mixed vegetable mixes will have edamame soybeans Normally the way we serve these is you boil them as a whole pod in salt water for five minutes or so And then as you handle them once they've been boiled a few minutes the seeds will kind of literally fall out of the pod You don't really have to go too much work to get them out. Now you might think well Soybeans I've tasted soybeans in the field. They're not that great. Well these edamamis at this stage They have a very mild flavor. I found that kids and adults both generally like them quite well You go to japan they'll serve them like shown in that basket you go to a bar or a ball game They'll serve them like that instead of popcorn or peanuts. You'll get edamame soybeans Our only limitation in the u.s. Has been That it's you've got to have refrigerated storage because it's a fresh green product if you're going to do these on a large scale But for farmers markets to me if I were selling to a farmers market I would grow these instead of green beans because they're more vigorous they grow faster They yield higher and you can sell them for a higher price So if again just stretch out some planting dates plant a row a couple rows of them each week for several weeks There's some good varieties of edamamis available out there I'm going to kind of skip over this because we're getting short on time Just mention if you have maybe you're only growing a couple acres of vegetables or a few acres of grains But have some extra land we're seeing more interest in having a kind of marginal ground planted to bioenergy crops So I was just down at a field day on taking sweet sorghum What we might call biomass sorghum and using that to make a squeeze into sugars that could be used for a variety of products Including ethanol Yep, there you go. Yes That's a great question. So if you're growing a biomass crop for energy How does that affect your soil nutrients if it's an annual crop like the sweet sorghum? Yes, you're going to have to replace those nutrients. We know that for sure If it is a perennial grass like switch grass or miscanthus the current research indicates that what those grasses will do is they'll Take the nutrients that are in the plant while it's green and they'll translocate those back down to the below ground root system And storage organs during the winter and that's how it regrows as a perennial the next year So if you're harvesting it once it dries down Then you're removing relatively few nutrients. You're moving mostly carbohydrates, but not the nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium so Right, so the thinking is that if you can let it go into the early winter or even wait till early spring to harvest some of these perennial grasses You can get by with little if any fertilizer, but that's still being researched to better understand it But that's the preliminary research results. So here's three types of perennial grasses. This is mixed prairie grasses This is a photo from central Illinois. This is switch grass and giant miscanthus These are three years old. This on the left is about six feet tall about eight feet switch grass and about probably 11 to 12 feet for the miscanthus Here's giant miscanthus later in the fall People worry a little bit about it becoming invasive the types that are being grown for bioenergy or sterile Hybrids they don't produce any seed even though they have these flowering structures But there are types grown in people's yards That do produce seed and show up elsewhere, but those are not the type grown for bioenergy use This is what it looks like in the spring. So if you harvest it When it's dry like this the leaves have fallen off the nutrients have gone back into the soil And this would be true of switch grass as well, and you're not going to remove many nutrients So it's although there's a high cost of planting That's relatively sustainable once it gets going switch grass is maybe even better from a sustainability standpoint because it is a native miscanthus is not It is found in our prairies and it's an excellent bioenergy crop that we're seeing more use of And here's hybrid poplar. Uh, we're also seeing more use of hybrid poplar willow things like that for planting So again, if you have some marginal ground, you're not using for something else You might think about doing one of these things, but of course it goes back to who's going to harvest it for you How are you going to market it and uh use that product Normally, they're going to be baled with conventional forage equipment Yep and put in square bales or round bales and then hauled to whoever's going to process them Typically a lot of them are being made into little fuel pellets like oak fuel pellets Uh for for burning at home fuel stoves or greenhouses or even in coal plants The university here is going to start using about replacing about 30 of its coal that powers the university With uh wood and miscanthus primarily wood, but some miscanthus Okay, I'm I'm pretty short on time. So I'm just going to skip over what I was going to say on tillage and Just kind of get to the last few slides here Of course, uh, we're seeing more use of the compost and materials One thing I would say about pest management One thing I've learned over the years if you're kind of new to farming You may go out in a particular week and see insects overrunning something My suggestion would be, uh, of course go in and read about it But maybe you don't need to get too excited depending on what it is I remember years ago when I was crop scouting in corn I saw aphids overrunning the corn plants in a whole field like this. These are a mass of aphids Oh gosh, we got to do something. Well the next week I went back and they were all dead all millions of millions of them were dead You might think well ladybugs came in and ate them. Well, that wasn't the case. It was There's a fungal organism that will show up on these aphids if there's any sort of rain or moisture And that just wiped them all out But we certainly can introduce on a small scale Biological control agents, but more importantly on a larger scale the key is to plant diversity There's been some interesting research that shows if you can plant a diverse mix of plants around the edge of a field And this is true whether it's vegetables or row crops That you're going to get more beneficial insects coming out of here and they'll fly Depending on the insect 50 100 feet or more End of the field to help control those Pest insects the same thing with the trees, of course, you'll get some songbirds in here too that can help with a certain amount of the insects So diversity diversity is the key This is about my last photo slide. This is a research trial in Ohio I saw last year and they were planning different mixes They had apples and peaches and blueberries and tomatoes One or two other vegetables and they tried planning them on a checkerboard fashion They tried planting them in rows different wists of rows They were trying to understand how it affected pest movement And they found that a lot of the pests could kind of jump around even in the checkerboard fashion But there was a slight advantage to that kind of arrangement, but they found it was a lot harder to harvest When you didn't plant in rows it really slowed down their harvest efficiency. So you asked about intercropping That's something you got to think about too is how efficient is it going to be to harvest when you're doing really complex planning mixtures Okay, I wanted to finish just just a couple slides on funding sources So if you're not too familiar with nrcs They have offices in most counties and you can get payments through nrcs to try some of these practices I've mentioned especially cover crops. I told you you can get about 35 dollars an acre And that's true. Whether you've got five acres of vegetables or 500 acres of corn You apply through that local office in nrcs and you have a good chance of getting a cost share payment for some of these practices or filter strips planning conservation planning You're not guaranteed to get it because they take a certain number in each area But it's worth applying for and then the usda sarra program that I work for Want to just mention that there is funding available. So coming up Later in november you can apply through a pretty simple application process I would say if you're at all comfortable with writing, this is something you can do in about a half a day But you can get up to 7500 dollars individually or if there's a couple of you working together 15 000 three or more triple that to 22 500 This money can be used for a variety of things. It is a grant which means you don't pay any of it back It's not alone. It's just to help you try out new ideas new practices on your farm so The ideas you could use that for some supplies Let's say you were trying to implement cover crops in a vegetable system It can play for your cover crop seed. It can pay for some of your labor If you needed to buy a different type of cedar It can pay for part of the cost of that equipment. Generally, we don't pay for all the cost of the equipment And if you maybe even hired a consultant to help you you could pay that consultant's time So you can use it in a variety of ways, but typically labor and supplies would be two of the most common Joan benjamin who's here at this meeting somewhere. She works at lincoln university in jeff city If you go to north central sarra.org or just google north central sarra You'll find the application guidelines for this program and jones contact information But this is a great program. There have been probably over 100 farmers in missouri and thousands in the region that have gotten funding to Tri-projects or ideas in their farm through this program So I would strongly encourage all of you to think about applying for that funding assistance So just to summarize, uh, you know when we look at these cropping system strategies You can have trade-offs when we're doing these between soil health erosion Whether we're at a till or not a lot of these come back to how much energy versus labor we're using And when I look at sustainability, uh, you know, I'm always thinking well, how do we adapt to more weather extremes? More demand for healthy foods versus biofuels and other things How do we improve the health of the soil and as we're doing these strategies improve the quality of life for folks? So we covered a lot of different topics there, but I've got some time to answer any questions you have So thank you