 Serium root rot and for the peas a lot of history of that and we just wanted to see if we could get any inhibition of that root rot. We chose the Clearfield technology so we'd have the option like Justin pointed out of using either raptor or beyond. We didn't put any fertilizer with this and we ended up just using grass herbicide only. We didn't use the raptor. So on 13th of June we had a pretty nasty hail storm. This was the south end of the field and it was 90 mile an hour winds and tennis ball size hail and it really cut things off but being cool season crops the growing point hadn't emerged from the soil yet and so by the 4th of July this is about what it looked like. It was really coming back nicely the moisture that we had gotten with the hail storm really helped to advance the crop and by late summer we had really what I thought was a pretty decent looking crop coming. What we were noticing was there were more peas on the hilltops a little lighter soil where the canola doesn't do as well and down in the lower ground wetter and prone to saline we had more canola taking over in those spots. So when harvest came we noticed that this it was high line yellows was our pea cultivar and they were maturing way ahead of this Clearfield canola. We we could see that was happening so we did go out and we desiccated with a quarter round up took a while to get everything dried down and by the time we went out there you can see the peas are pretty crispy and in fact when you look behind the header you could see there was quite a number of peas out there. We felt it was probably seven or eight bush old nacre. So you know it was overall we were we were pleased with the bushels we got but we thought we could have done better. That's what the the mix looked like in this instance by weight it was two-thirds peas and a third canola and so we stuck it in the bin this way we didn't have our cleaning operation set up we had plans to do it later on. We were concerned that if the peas were 14 moisture and the canola was nine or ten moisture was it all going to turn into a 12 moisture where the canola was molding but that didn't happen. We were we were happy with the way it stored and in fact we didn't get around to cleaning it for about a year and a half and it came out of the bin just as nice as it went in so we were pleased with that. So that year also we tried chickpeas and flax seeded with the same drill so they went in one inch deep together. We had put on too much seed we ended up doing 150 pounds and that was too heavy on the chickpea seed and we did about 12 pounds of flax and that was too little so we didn't use any fertilizer and no fungicide and really that whole summer we we didn't see any Ascataita that we knew about. This was the same timing the field got hailed on you can see the line between the two fields and this was 4th of July the same way it was coming back very nicely and by late summer the the flax had a lot of bowls on it and a lot of pods on the on the chickpeas. When harvest time came we we wanted to they were drying down pretty well together we decided to desiccate them also with a quarter roundup and used a draper header to cut them it cut similar to what soybeans would. The one thing we didn't like was the residue distribution you can sort of see it up in the upper right corner up there when you put that much flax through your combine it's just not going to chop and spread as nicely so we felt maybe in subsequent years we would consider using a stripper head instead. That first year we really felt that was our best fit comparing it to the piola and we were pretty excited about it. That's what our sample looked in the in the hopper. I don't remember exactly I want to say it was 60% by weight chickpeas and 40 flax. You can see there were a few unthreshed bowls in there but overall it it really worked nicely together. So then moving forward to 2019 because of the shattering and the yellow peas with the clearfield canola we switched to maple peas and maple peas are a longer bind type of pea full season they typically if you grow them by themselves they'll get maybe three and a half feet tall and just about a week before you harvest them they all go flat and you get to put all of that through the combine so we were kind of excited to see how that was going to work out. We did try some different seeding rates we did three different trials we tried 120 pounds and 110 pounds and 100 pounds of maple peas all with two and a half pounds of clearfield canola. We also tried some trials with 25 pounds of AMS ammonium sulfate didn't see any noticeable differences there. 2019 was one of those years that was a dry start the spring and the early summer were quite dry but by the 1st of July it started raining and that continued on in to harvest like a lot of you had but they really you know they filled in nicely and was kind of a jungle out there in places and by harvest time you can see we had some weeds out there but we also noticed that the the canola still didn't quite mature as early as what the peas did so you know between rainstorms we felt we better hurry up and get these off before we lost them so we did desiccate with reglone which is a lot like grimoxone it's a it's daiquat versus periquat and we got a pretty fast burn down on that and you know we had we had some struggles with it you can see the that the stems of the canola plants were pretty green but overall we got through it we also tried some some yellow peas with canola actually I should back up this was part of the population trial the strip that you can see down the middle that's lodged so bad that was 120 pounds of maple peas and as you go to the left of that that was 110 and we came to the realization we really didn't need that many maple peas in that mixture it's a smaller seed so we had also tried some yellow peas with the canola and once again we had just too much shatter on the yellows but we also did try some yellow peas by themselves and once again this was a field that had some history of root rot in it and we had grown peas too many times over the years and those peas by themselves were just loaded with root rot and really were quite poor so that year also we did oh I just wanted to to say when we harvested the maple peas and canola we tried one round with a stripper hat but we felt we were shattering too much of the canola so we did end up doing the majority of it or the rest of it with a draper hat so that year also we did try some more chickpea and flax that was what we were most excited about and we backed off that chickpea rate to about 120 pounds and we increased the flax up to 15 pounds we had some weeds in spots but it wasn't too bad but once again we had that prolonged wet spell at harvest time and these two they're both indeterminate type crops and with the cooler weather and the the moisture that we got they just wouldn't dry down eventually the chickpeas started to shatter and there was green mold moldy seeds and black moldy seeds and so it was getting to be go time it was the 1st of October and we just decided we'd go out with a stripper head and just salvage what flax that we could off of that but what I was amazed that we got a few chickpeas in there but it was primarily flax but what amazed me was that off of 15 pounds of flax seed we ended up with about 13 bushely acre flax and adjacent to that we had some flax by itself seeded at a full rate of maybe 48 or 50 pounds and that only yielded like 22 it was one of those years that wasn't a great one for the flax but I was I was impressed with what 15 pounds of seed could do for us so in 2020 we switched it up again we just wanted to get that maturity timing figured out so we switched over to yellow mustard and maple pee and we backed our seeding rate on the on the maples off to 90 pounds and we put in a half rate of of mustard five pounds we felt that was a pretty nice match it they really do a nice job of flowering at the same time they attract a lot of bees into a mix like that and they trellis together quite nicely so we're pretty happy with the way they were looking until an august 2nd hailstorm and it wasn't I mean I've had worse hailstorms have come through but you can see there's a lot of mustard on the ground there's some peas on the ground it didn't get all of them you can see there were were certain clusters that were greener so we still had some production there so seeing as how we had already lost some to hail we decided to use the stripper head and we were pretty happy with that we you know it was tough to tell if we were losing any more after their header had gone by from what the hailstorm had done but um at least we were able to get the material through the combine move a little faster and we were leaving a foot or better maybe maybe even 16 18 inches of stubble out there to catch snow and help with erosion and those kinds of things I was amazed at how many uh pheasants were out in the uh in that field and this little guy jumped on a road for a couple rounds um I finally had to get off onto the platform and just pick him up and throw him out and he takes off flying and he just he lands about 10 feet from a hawk that was sitting out there and I'm just going man you can't fix stupid hawk like me though you got dinner so um we also tried with the mustard we tried some yellow peas and that's a pretty good fit also the peas still dried down a little bit ahead of the mustard but we didn't dare to use the stripper head around that use the draper and um I think that's something that I'll probably try again most of the time the maple peas carry a higher value than than the yellows but this year it's gone the other way actually the yellows are worth more than the maples so after the chickpea and flax mess the year before we we decided we'd try lentils of flax I had seen a neighbor a couple of neighbors that have been trying this and they've been pretty successful with it I thought I'd give that a try we uh we use 60 pounds large lentils and 12 pounds of flax we had a lot of weeds in it um except for we had one done one strip of fall valley we had actually intended to plant soybeans on that but um that's the strip off to the right and that did a nice job on the weeds but it thinned out the flax quite a bit so I don't know if backing off from three ounces to two ounces would be a better idea or just increasing the flax rate to um to to help some of that thinning um we still have disease um uh Audrey's team had come out and scouted that field and let me know I I believe it was a phantom ISEs that we had in that field and um um it was very poor we we ended up cutting it with a stripper header just felt if we can leave as much of that residue upright again to catch snow and and keep from getting any erosion we were we were ahead there was you know the lentils we did get were pretty beat up and and uh we haven't gone back to that one since so in 2021 we stayed with a maple pea and mustard this went on an oats field the the oats had been hit by that same hail storm that got us on the on the maple pea mustard field so we had a lot of volunteer oats in it we had to use uh two grass applications as summer went on we just keep getting new flushes and we still ended up with some oats in it um at harvest time we were fortunate this last summer we had one really good rain but we did have a lot of a lot of hot weather with it uh this was up along the north end of the field along the road east of our house we had some flea beetle damage may probably work their way out maybe 60 feet or so into the field but what I like about an intercrop is had this been just mustard or canola on its own that kind of flea beetle pressure would have been huge uh at least we had the peas to take over it would have been bare ground and weeds if it hadn't been for the the peas taking over in that area so as summer went on they grew together quite nicely again and when harvest time came we decided again to try the stripper head and had pretty good luck with it until we got into some some greener areas we switched and went and cut some other crops for three days when we came back we had had some hot windy days and things were a little too crispy we we tried the stripper head again and we were just shattering too much of the peas and the mustard so we ended up finishing with the draper head so we saw some really strange differences this is the field east of the house uh we hit a line all of a sudden we went from between 40 and 50 bushels down into between 20 and 30 bushels and we we didn't quite understand what that was our seeding rate was the same our previous chemicals were the same uh it had all been hailed out oats the year before we we were at a loss I started looking back at cropping history and I came to the realization in 2013 we had seeded peas on the south field till we ran out and on the north side of that that had been flax and so we were still seeing and again this was a field with a lot of history of root rot so we were still seeing some of that root rot taking hold eight years later so the mustard helps to inhibit the root rot but it isn't a key role and I question if maybe the canola has a stronger anti-fungal property than what the the mustard does but that was a little surprising to us on the other quarter we knew we were going to have an issue on the east we could see it all summer that was actually the strip where we started in 2018 so we didn't get give it a long enough break so it isn't again you still need to keep your rotations in place but I think it it does help having abrasica in with your intercrop this past year we didn't try a flax intercrop with chickpeas or lentils or anything we went into the spring terribly dry like the rest of you there is no crop insurance on these intercrops I was pretty comfortable with the maple pee and mustard but I but less so with with the flax so I did a just a kind of a simple comparison only using variable costs I didn't use direct costs like seeding or harvesting or land costs but just a quick breakdown we had about $8.75 into chemical about 35 into seed we used 40 pounds of map and 105 of urea and $6 spreading charge for a total of $77 of expense the income on that this was a field that we had probably two miles south of where we had the maple pee mustard and it looked better all summer but I think the heat affected it a lot worse than what I realized ended up 720 pounds we had a 37 cent contract for a gross of 266 and our net income after variable was 189 now on the intercrop again we had a little more chemical bill there because we had to use two grass treatments on those fields a little higher seed cost the inoculant we have a cost there but our fertilizer and spreading zero and then we feel about a $17 an acre separation cost for a total of 72 which is pretty similar to what the mustard was but by the time we separated out 17 bushels of peas of $15 and 318 pounds of mustard at the 37 cents it gave us a quite a bit higher gross income and left us with $300 net after variable costs so my neighbor Morgan Jacobs who's here was kind enough to share with me his breakdown and you know we saw very similar results the the total cost he he put in just combining and spraying and and seeding cost but you know it's still the the companion crop was the lower of the three and the gross income was the higher of the three so one thing he did that I really like was he had put together a yield that it would take to equal what the intercrop has done and in the case of the mustard he would have needed nearly 1500 pounds compared to the 950 that he got to equal the the bottom line of of the intercrop and with the maple peas he was pretty close he would only needed 37 versus the 35 that he got but you know there are a lot of advantages to not having to scrape the ground to get the peas and that was talked about earlier so and of course there's going to be advantages and disadvantages between the two I like the fact that it adds diversity in the same field every year it has that potential for a higher combined yield we're reducing our fertilizer and chemical bills and I I truly believe that we are seeing a disease reduction in in our in our peas and in the chickpeas in the years that we've done that and of course the disadvantages we don't have a viable crop insurance we could be taking hail insurance I did get a quote on that decided it was too expensive after three years we might be able to get a written agreement from rma so we'll see if that comes out and see what value they give us and and what the the cost of that premium is of course the timing of maturities I've had to play with that a lot to get things to work out but it is an issue there's that need to separate it's definitely an expanse I do have a five to a quick clean also and I have planned on running the maple peas and mustard through that this year we had a lot of dead grasshoppers in the sample we have that load of oats that was in there I just felt it was just a little too dirty so again I hired the neighbors who have a bench sieve mill to run it through later on and then of course we're pretty limited on our herbicide options pretty plant is probably the best way to go if you're after broadleaf weeds fortunately the inter crops that I've been using are our grass tolerance so we have that in our in our tool belt at least so I guess that's all I have um did you want me to take a couple questions or do you want to wait for the panel well does anyone have any questions that would be specific for Greg because we're going to have a panel here next with um they would just go right into the panel I think sure yeah okay so we'll uh oh Audrey there was one question online okay sure go ahead um Sheldon asked which canola variety did you use and is it a variety recommended for straight cutting um it was pioneer let's see ends in a 76 each 76 is that sound right morgan it really isn't a shatter tolerant uh canola variety uh not not like you're in biggers but um again the reason we went with the clear field variety was thinking if we needed to use the uh beyond a raptor on uh as a as a broadleaf control but you know I I think this could work really well if we could find an early enough seasoned shatter tolerant canola to do this with I I'm still searching but for the time being there's been some nice contracts on yellow mustard and I plan to do that again this year