 So, I'm going to talk about cash crop yield gap reduction strategies. So in other words, strategies to reduce the yield lag that we normally see for corn planted behind cereal, which is the most common cover crop. And so, I'm going to talk from the perspective of conventional agriculture, but then make things that are applicable to organic systems. So overall principles, things that we're trying to get accomplished on farms is sustainably intensified agriculture, right, which then falsifies the principles of, number one, maximizing production and profit, number two, maximizing nutrient use efficiency, and three, minimizing environmental degradation. And that's something that's applicable to both conventional or organic cropping systems. These are good principles to manage by, right? So when you think about cover crops in the Midwest, on the North Central region, cereal rice king, right, and it's kind of like cover crops that anybody can use, right? You throw it out there late, it grows. You throw it out early, it definitely grows. You plant in the spring, it'll grow, right? And so, very good with nitrogen loss reduction, very good with that, I would say also phosphorus. Very good in photosynthetic carbon capture, right? As we were thinking about this emerging carbon market, and its original function that is known for is good ground cover you see here, an armor to reduce the impact of rain droplets that then detach soil particles and generate surface runoff, okay? So on a, let's see, okay, you can see that. On a plot scale, when you think about water quality, I did a study in Central Illinois, and we looked at what's the impact of cover crop, of cover crops, cereal rice dominated cover crop mixture on nitrate loss via tile drainage. When you apply the nitrogen in the fall versus applying it in the spring, right? We know that it's better to apply the nitrogen in the spring because you're actually applying it closer to when the plant has the highest demand for it, right? But then we also see that when we were doing this study, about 50% of farmers are still applying nitrogen in the fall. So we wanted to see, if I add cover crops to the system, what would that do to fall or spring applied nitrogen? And what we found was that fall and spring were not significantly different from each other, but we got a 46 to 49% reduction over time in cumulative nitrate load via tile drainage when you added cover crops, despite when you applied it, right? And so this was on a plot scale. So then we then got funding to look at this thing, cover crop impact on a watershed scale. And basically we found two large watersheds in central Illinois. We cover crop 50% of one of them, right? And so that's the green. And then the non-cover crop watershed is the non-cover crop. So we pay for cover crops in the green. We pay people not to cover crop in the black, right? So that we can keep it as a solid control. We looked at that over time, okay, we're about in seven years running. When we start out, we didn't see an effect of the cover crop on water quality, right? And so the thought is maybe residual or legacy nitrogen effect is overcoming the cover crop effect. And then as you cover crop consecutively on the same acres over time, all of a sudden you start seeing some separation where we see lower concentrations for cover crop watershed relative to the non-cover crop watershed. If you took an average of the percent reduction of nitrate load over time, it's about 30 to 35%, okay? And this is when we cover crop only 50% of that watershed. So it's not full coverage, not going to apply scale. When you think about phosphorus, right? This is what it looks like in that watershed from surface flow. It's a grass waterway between two real crop fields. And it's a lot of sediment and phosphorus here. So does cover crop effect this water quality? We looked at subsurface, what about surface, right? And so we were thinking about that. And the idea is to figure out is all cover crop species created equal relative to the ability to interact with phosphorus. So we looked at basically different treatments. So we had a control that had received no cover crops over a nine-year period, radish oats over a nine-year period consecutively, cereal rye over a nine-year period, and then annual rye. We looked at two different depths, zero to four, I mean, zero to two centimeters, and then two to four centimeters, right? You're thinking centimeters. Yeah, that's right, right? The impact, what we call the runoff zone, the zone of soil or the depth of soil that really impacts the concentration of phosphorus in surface runoff is about where we see about four centimeters. And so we took samples at those depths where we had consecutive adoption of these cover crops over a nine-year period. We saw no significant difference at the two to four centimeter depth in the ability of the cover crop to reduce phosphorus desorption. But then when you come to the zero to two centimeter depth, the surface, more surface depth, we see that if you had radish oats planted right over a nine-year period, that soil is more likely to give up phosphorus similar to the control. When you plant cereal rye, you significantly reduce relative to radish oats. When you plant annual rye, you significantly reduce compared to cereal rye, and definitely significantly different from these two. That's the control and radish oats. One explanation for annual rye being so effective is its rooting system. And so it assimilates phosphorus into its structure but puts it below the runoff zone, right, causing it to be a lower concentration of phosphorus that the runoff interacts with at the surface. So water quality check. We're doing a decent job there. But sustainable intensive rye agriculture has to include maximizing profit and production, right? So you can't have this without both of these being solid on farm. So when we go back to cereal rye at work hours, this is what we normally see. At least when I do the stays, right? And then when I looked at all of my colleagues in the Midwest, we did a meta-analysis and we see the same thing. We see about a 7% reduction in yield for cereal rye following corn, right? Now, that's on average. There's some farmers who figured it out somehow, and they can plant corn behind cereal rye and be okay, right? But on average, you're looking at a yield reduction. Then we begin to investigate why and when. What is happening? And so we did nitrogen uptake analysis on the corn, above-ground biomass, and we did that at different growth stages from V6 to R6. We found that at about V12, that's when you start seeing a separation or a reduction or a deficiency in nitrogen uptake for corn in cereal rye residue versus the control. When you extrapolate all the way out to R6, right, when that plant shuts down, right, and starts to brown up and so forth, stops taking up nutrients, you're talking about a 60 pound per acre deficiency that you have to manage for, right? Again, this is in conventional ag setting, and I'll get to. And so then we got funding to do a nitrogen tracking study. So we fed nitrogen to the cereal rye, we terminated the cereal rye, tracked it into the soil, we planted corn and soybean, and tracked it into the corn and soybean at different growth stages from V5 to harvest. And then we found that about 9% to 10% of what the cereal rye took up, right, in the above ground biomass, actually is used by the subsequent crop. So that means, let's just use 10. So if that cereal rye that you plant took up 40 pounds, your corn that you plant afterwards is only gonna see four pounds. So cereal rye is very stingy. And that's what's relating to here and here, right? All of this relates. These, all of these three are field studies. So cereal rye is good environmentally, but it might cause you to have to apply more nitrogen, right? To actually get the same yield. And it's like, do we wanna do that? We're kind of like a negative trade off there. So basically, I put together this cartoon to kind of help people understand this. This black line above it means nitrogen is available, below it, nitrogen is lost. So knowing cover crop situation, 72% of that nitrogen is in the soil, available above ground, right, in the soil. And then 28% is lost through the tile when you don't have a cover crop present. You add a cover crop to the system like cereal rye, it assimilates a large portion of the available nitrogen in the soil. And thus, you have a reduction in nitrogen lost through the tile drainage. Great, right? And then the theory is, and we would hope that a lot of this green, by the time we plant the corn turns brown, it gives the nitrogen back and it looks like this. But actually what happens is, you might as well put this green below the line. It's just as unavailable as the loss from the tile drain because you're only getting 10% back from where it took up. So it leaves you with a 40 to 60 pound challenge that you have to manage for to make the playing ground even in order to plant your corn, okay? And so that brought my group to the start of, we need next generation management that kind of helps us to elucidate and to increase our efficiency in nitrogen uptake for that corn because to plant cover crops and feel good about it and lose yield is just not sustainable. You can't call that sustainable. So we start looking at different practices. And I'm gonna talk about two today, but we look, now research, you might see other publications from our group where we're looking at in rate and in timing, okay? We're looking at with colleagues planting settings, right? How does different planting closing wheels affect our population? Because a lot of times we lose yield and it might not be nutrient related. It may be just you got interference from the residue causing you to have a lower population and you lost yield when you planted, right? In a high resident system. So then we're gonna talk about today, precision planted cover crops. You heard some from one of my colleagues, collaborators early this morning on that. And then we're gonna talk about the inclusion of overwintering legumes, okay? Could we use this legume to get some nitrogen fix from the atmosphere that then offsets what we need as fertilizer? And this is what we're looking for. So this is a small preliminary study that was done by one of my students. He basically, we had a Balanza clover stand and at planting he went in and collected samples at zero to five centimeters. And then we went back to the lab and put them in the incubator and said let's destructively sample over time and measure nitrogen mineralization. And lo and behold, what do we see? We have a control, we have a CRI, we have Balanza clover, right? Soil from those treatments, three replications from each dot that you see. And over time, as we simulate the growing degree days from emergence all the way to R6, we see that the Balanza clover is separated. So this is a mineralization, right? Of roots basically, because we took everything below ground of roots from the Balanza clover adding to the available pool of nitrogen that the corn can tap into. And so this is the kind of action that we wanna see, but this is an incubator. Does that translate to the actual field? Okay? And so we got funded, Amir and I, along with Andrew Manganot by Sarah and it's also funded by NREC. And we're looking at precision planning cover crops to improve profitability and environmental stewardship. Okay? And we have farms across the state, two states, Illinois and Indiana. And we're gonna see some data from both. So this is our study framework. We have three, our treatments are made up of three main factors. The first is cover crop species. So Balanza clover that overwent through legume. We're trying to find an alternative to that theory, right? Conventional or precision planted? You heard about this this morning. Precision planted is, we thought about what if we plant the cover crops in precise strips across the field and then leaving a row for corn to be planted in the spring using RTK guidance, right? Depending on what type of drill you have and the spacing you can get two or three rows of cover crops in between those 30 inch rows where the corn would go. What are you getting? None intersecting growing zones for corn and cover crops so you can kind of reduce some of that carbon penalty and nitrogen tie up possibly, right? You're getting less seed rate because you're only covering 50% or so, 30 to 50% of the area. And you're possibly increasing the soil tilt where you are growing, where you have to come and plant your corn. So you don't have the residue cover. It warms up fast, it dries out, right? And you kind of like get the same kind of action as if it was tilled, okay? So it's kind of like we're tilling without tilling, right? Then the last factor is whether we use a full rate or reduced rate of seeding. It's kind of determined how much seed do we really need? We treated each system, we treated each treatment like a system. So we didn't want the cereal right to get above 2,500 pound breaker of biomass and we didn't want the, well, we let the balansas go to get good growth because we want to fix as much nitrogen as possible. So these are not good pictures, well, especially with the light shining on it, but one thing that you can see is then you got to be patient. This is in Central Illinois, Champaign County, okay? You come out there after planting cover crops in December, you have basically nothing there, right? Then March, then April, then here's April, and then April 29th. You see the significant growth in the month of April, okay? What's in the cover crop biomass? What was the performance? So here's biomass on this vertical axis and then the two treatments, balanza clover, cereal right, and then we have full versus reduced rate, right? And then the blue is precision, full and reduced rates. So more of the story when it comes to balanza clover, we got right at let's say 1,200 pounds breaker of biomass, whether you planted full or reduced rate, it didn't matter. So with 50% to 75% less cover crops planted, right? You really didn't see a difference in the biomass. So that means you can get away with less seed, right? And get the same biomass, that's a pocket saver. With cereal right, you saw the same trend. Cereal right actually had greater biomass because it was more cold tolerant in Central Illinois. And so you had a biomass range of let's say 2,700 kilograms per hectare, but no significant difference as it relates to full or reduced rate or conventional or precision planted. So in the same manner you can get away with, you had less competition with 75% less seeding rate so you got more biomass, that makes sense, okay? Same trend for nitrogen uptake, on average, there was no difference across treatments, but on average you had about 30 pounds per acre in balanza clover, remember that, that's in Central Illinois, okay? I mean for cereal right, no treatment differences but about 50 pounds, 50, 55 pounds per acre on average, no treatment difference, okay? So this is significantly different, not within cover crop species, but when you compare the two, the seeded in ratio, which is really important to you all, right? Because that is the indicator of how fast the residue breaks down after it's terminated, okay? However you terminate it. And so balanza clover at about 10 to 11, so carbon to nitrogen ratio versus cereal right at about let's say 19 or 18 to 19, significantly different and this is, you ever wonder why corn stalks hang around longer than soybean is the difference in the seeding in ratio? Corn stalks being about 60 to one, soybean being about 19 to 21 to one. Lower seeding in ratio, faster decomposition. Faster decomposition, more release of nutrients, right? So this is what it looks like May 14th when we planted green into the balanza clover, okay? And so you're probably used to looking at fields like that and planting into it, right? The question is, is that profitable? Are we gonna get anything out of that, right? And so here's what we found with yields. It's a little messy because we had some things that happened to us that year that we couldn't control like voles, we had a lot of vol damage because when you get that canopy, that is a habitat that could become a habitat. And this is cyclical, the impact. But one of the things I wanna just point out, so here's the no cover crop control. This is, excuse me, the system without cover crops. This is the conventional system that we normally would do. Syri, full with drill, right? Trastic difference. When you think about balanza clover except for this one and this treatment, they're not significantly different from the no cover crop control. And then look at this yield relative to this yield, which you would do. That's the difference. So to me, if this was our gap, we are really closing the gap by just selecting another cover crop species that has a low seeding ratio to go before the corn. Even though it only had about 40 pounds per acre of nitrogen within it, but because of its low seeding ratio, it decomp fast. And I believe that if we wouldn't have had other problems where lower population and so forth, and that's management, we probably, most of these balanza clovers will be on this side and most of the syri will be on that side. So it kind of tells me that's potential that we need to rotate the cover crop before the cash crop. Put a low seeding ratio legume that fix nitrogen, grows nitrogen and releases fast before corn and put before your soybeans something that has a higher, heavier seeding ratio that hangs around longer, right? So that was in Central Illinois. We did a similar study in Southern Indiana, where you know about the difference, right? Warmer in the south, right? So if you live in Southern Illinois, you're gonna like this a lot. And so basically we had different cover crop species, different planting methods. Then we went from zero to 250 pounds per acre of nitrogen. We treated each like a system. We had the precision planted also, right? And again, now look at the difference. You can expect more nitrogen in this biomass but also more carbon, right? And so patience, patience. So in December, we're here. April, we're here. In the month of April, look at that. Look at this difference, right? So I heard some questions this morning about weeds. They're there. They're there. But then you can see by the 15th of April, you're starting up about the form of canopy. And then here, you're dominantly outpacing the weeds except for a couple of dense spots. By the time we got to May 15th, this is what we looked like. How much biomass is this? You think? Let's see. Let's, 6,000 pounds per acre? Close. Very close. Very good guess. You might've heard me talk before. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Okay. This is what we're getting below ground. What is this? Root nitrogen. That's where the bacteria is infecting the root and capturing nitrogen from the atmosphere. I mean from the soil air, which that means from the atmosphere. There are worms there, right? So you got a good system going here. The question is, is can we convert the nitrogen from this system into the corn to get greater yield, right? Especially at low nitrogen rates, which is applicable to your systems. So this is 2021, okay? So yeah, we got on average 45, let's say 45, 60 pounds per acre. In that was almost 2,000 pounds per acre of carbon. Okay? For the cereal ride, let's say 2,400 pounds per acre with about 960 pounds break of carbon. Again, whether you're a precision plant or a conventional, it didn't matter across any other species, but we did see in the southern part of the state, of southern Indiana, right? We did see greater balance of cover growth relative to cereal ride, but in central Illinois it was the reverse. So where you are is really important and it's gonna affect your management. We'll talk about that later. We're talking about 118 pounds per acre of nitrogen in that biomass. That's just above ground. We haven't quantified what's in the roots. CDN ratio 10, meaning that it's gonna turn over fast. Cereal ride, we're looking at 45 pounds, which was equal to what we had in central Illinois. Cereal ride is very stable. That's why it's the workhorse. No matter where you plant it at, it's gonna perform similarly. But it has a CDN ratio of 23. It's gonna return slower. So can we get some translation from this nitrogen into the corn? This is what it looks like when we planted green, okay? That's way worse than when we looked at in central Illinois. It's scarier for some people. It was scarier for me. And so we took some drone footage to kind of capture this because we wanted to know what was the impact of that? Does this have an impact on our corn yield? Because we know we have the nitrogen in the biomass, but could we get it out? All right, on this axis, we have the nitrogen we added to the system. This is what's relevant to you, right? All of it is, but here's zero nitrogen. Here are the cereal ride treatments. No difference in precision versus conventional, okay? Slight difference, not significant. Here is the Balanza clover, here's the control. These three are not different from each other, but this is almost, that has to be at least 50, 60 bushels per acre greater just by choosing Balanza clover relative to cereal. And it's making you not significant different, significantly different from the control. That difference stayed there. It persist all the way up to about 100 pounds per acre. Cereal ride didn't catch up until you added 150 pounds per acre, but this ended up being the MRTN for the control and the Balanza clover treatments. We didn't have enough nitrogen to get there for the cereal ride treatment, right? One thing to think about, almost 200 were close to, well between like 170 bushels with only 100 pounds of nitrogen, but no separation between the Balanza clover and the control. And I think that this is because we had stink bugs, we had lower harvestable ears because we were not able to get seed to soil contact so we lost some population, right? But these are things that farmers can fix. What we're looking for is, do we have greater potential for more competitive yields when we change the cover crop species before the corn? And we do see that potential, okay? Glyphosate and 24D. Okay, you sprayed it. Yes. No, no, but you could, there are those who do. Okay. Yes. It was a hollow stem. Yeah, very likely. Yes. And you let it get into its reproductive stage, you crimp it, it'll lay down nicely. And you got to plant the clover wheel. And you have to plant in the same direction that you crimp or else you're gonna have a mess. Okay. So you crimp it and lay it down like this and you plant that direction. Yeah. 2022, 5,000 pounds break of biomass, right? For Syria right, 2,700 or so, okay? 156 pounds break of nitrogen in the above ground biomass. We got it again, second year in a row. But this is in Southern with more heat units. City in ratio a little higher, but not bad. 13 versus 10. And a lower city in ratio for the Syria with more nitrogen there, 18 versus 23. But the trend is the same. We decided to plant brown green instead of green. You can see the difference here, right? You can see the difference. And we think that made a difference because now at zero end, we have clear separation between the belanza clover and the control. This is what we expected in the first place. Cause if you have over a hundred pounds of nitrogen in the above ground biomass, you expect some nice transfer, right? But we didn't see it because we didn't start the decomp cycle fast enough before we planted. And I think that that's making a difference. We also, when we planted brown, I'm not showing it, had no significantly significant difference or no difference in corn population. So planting brown, green, or into decomposing residue rather than green slippery slimy residue, right? We got better population. Off the bat, we were gonna do better with yield because we got more plants out the ground. You could terminate the clover. About two weeks before, yeah. So we were real conservative in the second year cause we didn't want to run into- No tilt, no tilt. No tilt, right into it. So you can see separation. Now this year, precision planted did better than conventional for cereal, right? And then it was not significantly different from the control, which is also a significant finding, okay? And my colleague found that several places that he studies. And then the Belanza clover was significantly different from these three. And we see that persist all the way up to 200 pounds. Again, MRTN for all the Belanza clover treatment was at about 150 pounds breaker. That's the second time, two years in a row. And then the no cover control and then precision cereal, right? Was that about 200 pounds? And then the conventional planted cereal, right? Was that 250? Now that's a 100 pound difference. And that's what you needed to get at the same year. This is the 50 pound difference. If you consider the cost of the Belanza clover, right? Which is about $3 a soul per pound. Let's say we applied 2.5, but let's just make it either we apply three pounds, right? So this is $9 in something, plus another 10 to terminate it. So you're talking about let's say $20 per acre for the management. What's the price per pound of nitrogen? You probably don't know it for in organic. It's a dollar. So we have a 50 pound saving. And to get there, we use 20 pounds. Everybody's doing the math? The cover crop paid for itself and put something else on your table. In this case, in this situation at this field in Southern Illinois. What do we need to do to be better in Northern, right? We gotta start looking at early maturing soybean. We also can look at can we come behind if you have any wheat ground? You come behind wheat, right? And you can get that good growth from that clover. If you started early, it'll grow. And that's what we are experimenting. We're also looking at like, a pristine clover to see if we can come in and march. And then be patient and maybe plant first of May to see if we can get at least 100, let's say 80 pounds of nitrogen in the above ground bottom. I think if we get that, we may see similar situation. So we're trying to be really creative to figure out how can we apply less and get the same or greater yield. In this carbon sustainably produced good climate, you also need to think about your system CI, carbon intensity score. The lower your intensity score, your grain may qualify for other markets that gives you a premium on your bushel. When you apply less fertilizer, what happens to your N2O emission? It goes down. What happens to your leech and it goes down. Now one of the questions we have not fully explored but we are funded to explore Amir and I is what happens when we add Balanza clover to the system? What happens to towel drain nitrate? We're not there yet. Next year we'll have some later, right? So to conclude, you can add 50% lower seeding rate and get the same performance from the cover crop. Balanza clover generated about an average 130 pounds per acre of nitrogen within the biomass. It could function as a nitrogen credit, depending on your residue management. Or you're gonna plant green, plant brown. That's your decision. Weather kind of makes that decision for a lot of us. Balanza clover MRTN for both years, about 150 pounds per acre to get to the same year as the non cover crop control. And that's about 100 pounds less than CERI, okay? It's about 50 pounds less than the control in one of two years. In conclusion, I think that we need to think about these overwintering legumes and this is from genetics. They've been genetically modified to stand cold. But we still have some adaptive management leverage we need to pull in order to get them to perform in all of the altitudes of the state. And so I stopped there and entertained discussion if there's time.