 Hello, I'm Mary Salverte. I'm a professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at North Dakota State University. And we are in Fargo, North Dakota at the Experiment Station. And I work with cover crops and forages. And here we have an example of a variety trial of 31 different cover crops planted in two different seeding dates. And this is part of a CER project. It's a professional development program to teach and educate different farmers and professionals about cover crops, how the different cover crops look like, where their functions in the soil, how they help soil health, how we can intercede them into soybean and corn and be able to get all those benefits from these cover crops. You probably wonder why we are interested in working on cover crops and we've been doing so much research. And the reason is we have been losing a lot of our top soil because of soil erosion, especially here in the Red River Valley in this area. Soils, they are tilt and unprotected. We get very strong winds in the winter and we're losing precious top soil. And also because of continuous tillage and also continuous crops like corn monoculture or very short rotations like corn and soybean, our soils have lost a lot of their diversity and they're compacted, their infiltration reduces. So when it rains, instead of the water going into the soil, it actually runs off with nutrients and soil. And that's why cover crops, each one of them have different functions and all of them contribute to improve soil health, reduce erosion, conserve water in the soil. Also in the spring they can remove water faster so soils that have cover crops actually drive faster in the spring so farmers can plant earlier than farmers that are in conventional tillage. So the benefits of cover crops are numerous. They not only help soil health but also can be used as a forage for grazing. They increase the diversity of microbes in the soil and mycorrhiza and also they produce a lot of flowers which are great for pollinators. This area, the season is very short so we don't have much time to grow cover crops in the fall but we can see here which ones grow better and if we can intercede them in soybean or corn we can lengthen that growth time for the different cover crops and get that. So with the funding of SER we've been able to fund all these educational activities. And what is really important about seeing local information is that any farmer in this area if they want to try or adopt cover crops is important and they see what works here and what doesn't work here because things are very different in other states and things that might work very well in different states might not be the same here. So it's very important that they attend these field days and these workshops that we do so they learn about what things will work for them on the farms.