 First, I'd like to say thank you to everybody who's been here at the Dakota that's come this morning to our cow calf series called the Dakota Cow Calf Clinics. Today's session is cover crops and cattle. We do have another session that's going to be on Wednesday, February 16th, and that's beef cattle, and it's going to cover beef cattle reproduction. Today's conference is located, as we said, in multiple sites across the state of North Dakota, and basically the eastern part of the state with guest speakers coming from both Carrington here and Botno as well as Fargo and Bismarck are going to be joining us. Our topic for today, as we looked at, was cover crops and how they interact with cattle, and we're going to start off the morning with our county extension agent up in Botno County, Tim Semmler, and he's going to present to us cover crops, value, and cost. I believe that's right, Tim. If that's the case, or please continue on and let us know if things don't work, everybody. Okay, thank you. Okay, thanks, Carl, and good morning. Is my sound coming through okay at all points here? It's fine at Carrington. Oh, okay, good. What we're going to do this morning is I'm going to walk through a little bit of things that happened here in Botno County, over the course of this last year, and I've got this PowerPoint here on soil health cover crops and relay cropping, and I'm only going to go part ways through that, because I'm going to stop at the Carrington data because I'm sure Ezra will be covering that in her presentation. I also have the cover crops chart to demonstrate, so for those of you at the host sites, you'll want to have both my PowerPoint and the cover crops chart up and ready to go on. I'm going to go through slide nine on the regular screen with PowerPoints, and then minimize that, and then just demonstrate that cover crop chart, and then we'll go back, and then we'll go to the whole screen with starting with the pictures of the cover crops that we saw around the county. So with that, we'll go ahead and get started, go to slide two here. This presentation started out visiting with crop producers, and you know, why would you grow a cover crop if you aren't a livestock producer? In Central North Dakota, most livestock producers are diversified, so I think this applies to quite a few people. This past year, and some of these wet years, we have quite a bit of preventive planning or sizable wet areas in the fields, and a reason for growing cover crops on these wet areas or even dedicating fields to it is that if we have plant growth on there versus idled phalloland, you have healthy soil organisms keeping the soil active and healthy throughout the growing season of the year, and if we don't, if we idle this acreage, or if we spray down even the weeds on it, we have the organisms like rhizobia and mycorrhizae that will go to sleep, and of course those are some of the major ones. There's many, many, many more in the soil that keep things going and active throughout the year. Rhizobia, of course, is the bacteria that works with legumes to fix nitrogen in the soil. If we can keep those going so much the better, and then the mycorrhizae is a fungus in the soil that interacts with plant roots to liberate phosphorus in the soil, so it's a win-win situation by keeping some plant growth growing in those fields, even if we have failed or wet acres. Another reason, of course, would be in these excessively wet years to utilize excessive moisture. If we use up that topsoil moisture, additional rains fall in, leeches down the salts deeper into the soil profile, and we do have predominantly calcium salt type soils in the state that will create problems under these wet years. Undercover crops, of course, if we have legumes growing in that acreage, we'll fix nitrogen in the soil, and that's a benefit to the crop the next year. More advantages to growing cover crops. If we choose a tap-roated cover crop, we can bring deeper soil nutrients closer to the soil surface. A major one of those would be sulfur, but also we could see potassium and phosphorus increase by growing some of these deep tap-roated crops, and we'll take a look at some of those on the cover crop chart. We can also break up clay pans by having those deep tap-roated cover crops growing, and we've actually seen some results where they'll do that. We can improve soil organic matter content, which is always a plus. Dave will cover that a little bit more in his presentation, but if we have cover crops that have optimal carbon to nitrogen ratio, that also helps fix nitrogen in the soil and liberate our nutrients in the soil. Of course, for a livestock producer, we can provide high-quality late-season grazing for cattle, sheep, any livestock that will utilize forage. Basically, in choosing a cover crop, we're thinking about implementing this on your operation. What are your goals for a cover crop? What are some of the negatives on cover crops? Certain seed mixes can use up existing fertility. Is that a good trade-off? If we think about the cover crops that we grow, such as the grassy-type crops, the sedan grasses, the millets, maybe oats, maybe barley, those will utilize nitrogen, but if you're utilizing excess moisture and getting those salts to leach down, maybe it's a good trade-off for that particular year. Another thing to think about is crop insurance limitation. There is a difference between prevented planting and failed acres and how you can utilize those acres. In the case of prevented planting, you cannot harvest or graze those crops after November 1st. Well, we all know that in this particular part of the world that November 1st it can be pretty touch-and-go, whether or not we have a snow cover and can utilize those crops. I think maybe that needs to be worked on a little bit by producers through their insurance companies to see if they can get that liberated a little bit. In the case of failed acres where you planted a crop and it flooded out and then you seed in the middle of the summer, actually there are less restrictions on those, so you can utilize those earlier than November 1st. Also, the cover crop choice affects the residue left on the field next spring. Do you have a strictly no-till operation or do you have somewhat of a reduced-till operation or conventional-till? All of those factors enter into your decision whether or not to grow a cover crop and or the choices that you would take in putting a cover crop on those acres. What are some of the seed costs involved in the handout that I gave all of the sites? This is just simply some of the costs that I found for some of the major crops that are probably used by people experimenting with cover crops. So it varies, but these are the numbers that I put together. And the main idea here would be to shop around. You can find large variations in the costs of the different cover crops that you might choose as well as the quality. So make sure you ask questions of the seed dealers after you research the subject and decide what you want to go with. Not just any radish will do. If you want a large tap-rooted radish, you have to get the radish hybrid of the posha, so to make sure that you get those, you can also buy just plain radish seed that would be similar to the garden radish as it should grow. So ask some questions of the seed dealer before you commit to buying that. Okay, what would be some cover crop considerations? You know, what's the reason you're going to grow the cover crop out there? You know, what's the cost? Are you going to mix your own seed? It's a good use of leftover seed at the end of the seeding season. Maybe you've got peas in the bin. Maybe you've got barley. You can cheapen that mix by using bin-run seed as long as it's clean and won't introduce other weeds to the ground. Use up some of that stuff so it's not sitting around and then maybe buy what you need to supplement that. You know, what is the time of year you're going to seed this? If it was preventive planting, you have basically all summer long to get this growing. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And as soon as it's available. If you have flooded out crop, such as my case, I'll show you some pictures in a little bit, then you have to wait until things dry down before you can get that going. You know, what are you going to choose? Warm season versus cool season cover crops. Again, that cover crop chart will help you in those selections. You know, what's the seeding rate? Generally speaking, we're seeding about half the commercial rate as you would when you seed a crop for commercial production. Plus, you're doing some blends out there. So, you know, another thing to consider is preceding weed control. How are you going to do that? These crops aren't magic by any means. They need elimination of competition. So be sure that you do some type of preceding weed control, whether it's tillage or chemical or something else. And also, what's your goal? Are you going to graze it or not? Are you using it to increase soil organic matter? Are you going to provide late season grazing? All those things will be a consideration when you're looking at growing a cover crop. Okay. Again, on the handout, I got these seed recipes and I put up here. These are not gospel. These are just some thoughts that I put together of different mixes and what the cost would be. Again, the rates are about half the commercial rate and they're based on the cost I put together for 2010. And you can see as you look across there, I've got all, you know, some mixes that are predominantly just a cool season recipe, some that are a mix of cool season and warm season. And again, depending on what time of the year you're going to get these crops growing will be dependent on what mix you decided to put out there. Okay. Let's take a look at that cover crop chart. So I'm going to minimize the PowerPoint right now and go to that USDA ARS cover crop chart. And an example of that is on the back of that handout that I had along with the website. If you want to download this thing, it's a pretty small file. It's a runs in Adobe format. So if you, you can get Adobe for no charge on a computer and you can download this from the USDA ARS Mandan site and that site is printed for you on the handout. This is a really handy little chart. All you have to do, it's set up like the periodic chart. And all you really have to do is go to the different selections and decide which one you want to go with. But you see that the reason I like it even just for a handout is that it has things broken down into first of all, cool season on the left hand side, left hand to two thirds of the way across. It's got all the crops broken down into cool seasons. Then it's got the warm season crops on the right one third. It also has grasses on the right and left columns. And then the broadleafs are in the center. We also have the legumes down there that are in the brown squares and the blue squares in the case of the warm season, warm season crops. So all you really have to do to find out more is click on the various crops to see what they look like. And then you can return, but it gives some pretty good characteristics. So we'll just take a look here at the turnip, the purple top turnip shows a picture of what they look like. Basically breaks it down into what it is. You know what type of growth it is. It's a root crop, of course, high water use, poor salinity tolerance. It has a seeding dip for you on there, a quarter to half an inch. This is a small seeded crop like canola. So you have to seed it shallow. Crude protein content in the tops and the roots, broken down, talks about whether or not it works with the mycorrhizae fungus in the soil. So all of those things. Now all you have to do to return to the main chart is hit the back to the chart. And let's go take a look at radish. Here's the radish that will break up soil clay pans. And again, it's in the same family as a purple top turnip and produces a big taproot. But my observations over this past summer is that if you're going to take the advantage of a large taproded crop like this radish, you have to get it seeded early enough in the summer so that it develops full growth. We had 30 inch tall radish plants, which I'll show some pictures here in a little bit growing in the county that were seeded in early August. But yet the taproot only got to be about a foot long and about three quarter inch in diameter. So it looks to me like in order to get the large taproot system, you'd have to get this one going in June sometime, or at least by the first of July so that you can get advantage of breaking up soil clay pans and maybe bringing up some deep nutrients. So we'll go back and look at a couple more here. Let's just choose Lupin, one of the cool season or Lentil, one of the cool season legumes. And of course that one will fix nitrogen in the soil. Again, a little bit deeper, deeper seeding depth. It will work there. Okay, we'll go back. Let's choose a warm season broadleaf amaranth over here. That's what amaranth looks like relative of the redred pigweed. It will work in these situations. Again, many different species. It's a low water user, but will grow in the warm part of the season, tolerant to heat and drought. Seeding depth is deeper, crude protein okay. You know, again, does not work with the mycorrhizae soil fungus. We'll take a look at one more and then we'll get out of this one. Let's just take a look at, pearl millet would be an example of a warm season grass here. Again, very tall growth, very similar to Sudan grasses. Upright plant architecture, low water use again, poor salinity tolerance. Again, you can seed it a little bit deeper than some of these other ones. Basically kind of average protein, but this one does work with the soil mycorrhizaeal populations to help work with that. So real handy chart for anybody to use. And even if you just have the handout, it's something that will be useful I think to producers in helping form their opinions. But if you have a computer and have access to the internet, you can download it. No charge from the ARS site. Okay, any questions on that? Comments? Tim, this is Carl at Carrington. Are you presenting the pictures up on the screen, or are we supposed to be doing it here? Well, you're supposed to be doing it there unless you can zoom the camera onto my screen. That has worked before, but that's why I sent the PowerPoint. Okay, gotcha. We have handouts here, so that's not a problem. Good enough, but okay, we're going to close out this cover crop chart now and I'll go back to my PowerPoint and we'll be starting on slide 10. And we can go to the full screen now, because we'll start with some pictures. For you, there is the CD, in case you wanted to look at it. Okay, everybody get there. Okay, on slide 10 here, do you want to see this next season? These are some pictures I took of my farm after the June rains of last summer, and I've got about 70 acres of crop land that I crop on the home quarter along with pasture and that sort of thing. This last year I seeded about one half corn and one half flax, and by the time we got to the end of the May, this is what it looked like. I had about 50% flooding on those acres. So if we don't utilize this excessive moisture, we're going to have the same problem the next season. And then of course with the snowpack out there, the way it is right now in most of the state, if you were relatively soaked up going into fall freeze up, you can certainly have some problems this next year. Okay, so what had I decided with the cattle and that sort of thing and with fairly sizable acres of failed crop that I'd need to do something with it. So I had to wait until about the first of August before I could get in and do something with these spots. And again it was about 25 acres out of the 25 to 30 acres out of the 70 acres. So I got in there and got those cleaned up, got them ready to do some planting. What I just decided to do is mix my own mix. So I got a hold of some oat seed, bought some turnips and radish, kind of a simple mix, and I just set it up in the hopper wagon with the oats and blended in turnips and radish seed out of the bag and going into the auger of my little air seeder there. And of course the guys are more advanced and their farming can laugh at my antique equipment but I guess it works. So that's all I did is I kind of scooped the radish and the turnip together, about a half of each per acre with 30 pounds or about a bushel of oats, and my costs ended up being $13.35 an acre. Okay, so we had some problems with moisture. My goal was to get this seeded by the 15th of August but between August 1st and the 10th you know I'd gotten it worked up and then we had more rains and we had to go back in there with roundup and spray down the volunteer weeds again and got to be late August before I got this seeding in there. But you want to seed this stuff shallow when you're thinking of radish and turnips and those types of crops you're basically dealing with a canola seed and that needs to go in about a half an inch deep and the oats and if you deal with some of those crops of course if we just get those into moisture whether they're shallow or deep they're going to grow pretty well. So we got them seeded the 27th of August by the 7th of September. Next slide. Here we've got the pictures of emergence of the crop starting to come up pretty good. We of course got some more rains on this after we got it seeded so it was just absolutely perfect growing conditions for these cover crops and up comes the radishes and turnips along with the oats seed, good emergence of September 7th. Okay, this is a picture on October 1st of the stage as you can see there we've got about two or three inch oats and by this time you can start to differentiate between the radishes and the turnips. The radish will have scalloped leaves along the margins where the turnips will have more of a rounded leaf and more resemble canola. So we'll take a look at those but both of them you know the mix was pretty good the the population is pretty good as you can see by the 1st of October. Here's a little bit more of a close-up on October 1st and here's a good example right in the center of the screen we've got the scalloped leaf and we've got the radish out there this is a posh radish hybrid and then right next to it is more of a rounded leaf again it more resembles either tamed mustard or tamed canola you can see there that would be the the purple top turnip. Okay what about some cooperators in the county that also tried this what were their results? We had a cooperator by the name of Glenn Cunningham out at Lansford and he had prevented planning right next to his farm he runs you know an average herd of cattle for this part of the country and he seeded earlier than I did August 3rd. He had about 40 45 acres next to the place he had a custom blend put together by a seed company that he deals with the local elevator I was 25% oats 25% millet 90% peas 60% barley 9% turnips and 6% radish. Seed cost per acre for him was $22.65 so another basically about another $10 per acre than what it cost me to blend my own. He went ahead and grazed the cows after November 1st. His comments were herd adapted quickly no digestive upset on that mix out there and actually his calves reduced creep feed consumption while they're out on the cover crop. So next slide shows what that looks like you can see a really lush stand here this was you know way past my knees it was at least 30 inches tall you can see in there the white flowering radishes in the background and in the foreground you can see some of the purple top turnips and of course there's the barley and the millet mixed in there just a really lush looking crop this was October 14th. Here's a little bit of a close-up on the Cunningham's operation you can see in there and actually it wasn't in the seed mix but right in the center we've got a lentil growing in there and then we've got the radishes and turnips there in the in the background but that wasn't supposed to be in there but I assume that the seed company had an extra bucket of lentil so they probably just threw it in the mix just to clean things up. Here's a close-up of the turnips and radishes on October 14th again seeded August 3rd. You can see the turnip is about the size of a golf ball a little bit larger more more like a tennis ball and then the radish has about a three-quarter inch top on it and about you know eight to ten inches long so again if a guy's going to capitalize on the deep tap-rooted cover crops I think we need to get an earlier start on August 3rd and certainly July 1st would be a goal maybe even the 20th of June and so that would be on preventive type preventive planting type acres or something that you could get in relative or early even if you dedicate a field for that. Okay another cooperative we had was a young cattle crop sky by the name of Pat Flaherty out of Westope and again he had prevented planting again this was right next to his place and he seeded the mix on July 26th and he again just took and pretty much blended up his own. He had on hand bin run confectionary sunflowers, RVCPs and then he bought millet turnips and radish. I didn't get the cost from him but you could refer to the charts for for that. He turned and heard out on November 1st again and was back there on November 17th and took pictures and it was grazed clean off. Again a pretty good sized acreage next to the place but the cattle utilized it all and they even grazed the roots of the turnips and the radish is right down to the soil service. When I was out there on the 14th of November all you saw was the top the bottom half of the turnips just a white ring in the soil and both producers will incorporate this into their system as an annual forage management tool whether they have you know cover crops or not or whether they have prevented planting or not. So this is a picture of Pat Flaherty's on October 12th. Again a very tall growth we're looking at probably 30 to 35 inch tall cover crop out there. Again the white flowering radishes in the foreground. You can see peas mixed in there. He was relatively heavy on the peas compared to the cunning hams. This is a little bit more of a close-up. It shows you can see down in there you've got the purple top radish sticking out of the ground but this is relatively heavy soil and you can see that those radishes and turnips were you know loosening up the soil and getting things to you know really separate there. This shows next slide here shows a mixture of peas in there radishes turnips and that sort of thing. This is a picture of Pat Flaherty's root crops. Again we've got about a tennis ball sized turnip on there and then we've got actually a radish that is about three-quarter inch on top and a little bit shorter than it was in cunning hams simply because I'm sure there's plenty of moisture there and the soil is a little bit heavier than over at the Lanceford site. Okay back to my farm. How did I pan out? Growing period was basically over by the 24th of October we'd had enough you know hard frost by that time that you could see even the the radishes and turnips which are pretty well frost hardy starting to slow up and so I didn't have that much growth out there we had about six to eight inches total growth so we didn't really get a measure on the total tonnage. A few comments here about the the salinity of tolerance of these crops this picture is an area that is compared to the other area that I just showed relatively salty gives me problems it's a saline alkyli area about two to three acres in size and you can see that actually the turnips and the radishes didn't do well at all this area in fact they had killed them out. You can see on the ring around the outside where there was less flooding and salinity that the oats survived but very little growth out there so if I want to do something with the crops cover crops in this area I might want to consider sugar beet or sunflower there's something that will actually do fairly fairly well on the on the flooded and saline areas so if that's your problem the the turnips and radishes aren't going to do very well for you even small grains won't. Okay this is just a shot here on October 24th again it shows the the radishes and turnips mixed with the oats you've got kind of yellowing leaves on there which means they've had about all the frost they can take so there really wasn't any reason to let it grow any longer and let the herd pretty well take and utilize what they could. This just shows a shot of the overall growth out there eight to ten inches tall with the oats and the radishes in the turnips and so that's about all we got and again if I did it another year I would certainly try to get it going earlier than I did. Okay and then finally this is a shot of the two root crops on on my acreage that was seeded August 27th. You can see here that we've got a root on the radish only about you know again three-quarter inch in diameters or the the turnip doesn't penetrate very far only about three to four inches down and the radish is only about half an inch in diameter and about six inches long so we utilized some moisture out there but and provided some forage and grazing the cattle absolutely loved it they cleaned that off first before they grazed in the corn and and that's that's the way it went so that's my experiences I guess on cover crops I think they really have a fit for both diversified cattle end grain operation as well as just the cattle operation I think there's definitely some use for them out there you can save costs by blending your own seed if you want the best seed source you probably want to get something blended up by by a seed dealer so with that I think that is it yes I've got some stuff on relay crops here but we're going to let Ezra cover that from the Carrington Center so with that I guess I would ask if there's any questions from the group and turn it back to Carl