 I'm Seth Applegate. I'm a graduate student here. My name is Andy Lenson. I'm on the faculty in the Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University and Seth and I and Mary Wiedenhoft and Tom Casper with USDA ARS. Sarah Carlson with Practical Farmers of Iowa are working on a cover crop corn project that involves 17 different cover crop treatments that are all followed by corn. So our research is on no-till ground and we are looking to see we're especially interested in seeing are there benefits to adding mixtures into the cover crop system. Most of the acres in Iowa if they're planted to a cover crop are planted to rye right now and so we're trying to figure out is there benefits that we can have to adding diversity to the mixtures. We're especially looking at Camelina and Hairy Vetch. Hairy Vetch a lot of farmers are interested in that and we're seeing if that is a good option at this point and Camelina just to add diversity. It also has a really low carbon and nitrogen ratio so that may be helpful in the study. In Seth's study the 17 different cover crop treatments are nine sole crops with a range of winter annual grasses winter rye and winter crudacaly and two canola cultivars Camelina sativa which is also in the same family as Brassica napis canolas. Also one of his treatments is Brassica Rappa. Purple top turnip is the cultivar of Brassica Rappa and then also has Hairy Vetch so there are and and also spring out and spring barley has two more grasses that I forgot to mention. We've seen some we only established two sites we meant to have three but it just didn't work out and we established at those two sites and all of the crops came up in the fall. We had a lot of loss of the canola, the barley, the oats and the purple top turnip did not come up in the spring but the rye, the vetch, the triticale and the camelina did come up in the spring. Rye was by far the greatest producer of biomass and also had the greatest uptake of nitrogen. Rye beat every other entry about doubling the amount of biomass so that's really important to consider for erosion control. Also the rye took up an average of about 12.2 pounds per acre of nitrogen and in Iowa most of our ground is losing 30 pounds per acre of nitrogen and that was only with limited growth as you remember maybe in 2013 to 14. It was a really cold winter. This year we've seen rye production be four times, two to four times is greatest last year and we're still processing results to see how much nitrogen are we taking up and not allowing to be lost from the system. It's already well known that cover crops can conserve soil and by decreasing erosion and by uptake of nutrients particularly nitrogen and phosphorus that otherwise when they get into waterways through leaching or through erosion and movement with sediment from erosion decrease water quality greatly. We need additional cover crops and just rye. Diversification is always important so this research addresses the issue to some degree of does diversification within a cover crop mixture impact weed management? Does it improve weed management or not? Does it impact corn yield and quality or not? The effect the occasionally observed effect negative effects of winter rye on subsequent corn growth and development and yield have prevented a lot of farmers from trying rye after a soybean crop and we have a lot of soil erosion following soybean production in the corn belt and in the upper the upper the mid south. It's very common issue very common problem and perhaps we can improve the amount of or increase the amount of acreage that's planted in the cover crop following soybean before corn by something like camelina where we have yet to observe any negative or deleterious effects on corn.