Our next speaker is Justin Jacobs and he is a research specialist here at the Williston Research Extension Center. Justin has bachelor's degree in crop and weed science with a focus in agronomy from NDSU. In his role as research specialist, Justin works with a variety of trials in small grain and broadleaf crops. He began researching intercropping, chickpea and flax, and field pea and canola in 2018. He is also a beginning farmer focused on soil health practices including intercropping and cover crops. Welcome Justin. Oh well good morning again and welcome to the intercropping workshop. I'm really excited to see this, this take off and get started. As I mentioned, I started working with intercrops back in 2018, so this has kind of been a passion of mine to see intercropping grow and the knowledge of intercropping. Along with working at the research station, I actually have a small farm kind of northeast of town near Ray, where we are working on growing some large fields of pea and canola. And then last year we tried some flax and peas together. I'll share a little bit about my personal experience at the end, but the first portion of this talk is going to be about the data from the research trials that were conducted at Messon Valley from 2018 to 2020. I'm going to focus largely on the data between 2019 and 2020. The reason was because the trial kind of shifted focuses from the 2018 trial, which was kind of see if we could even make this work. We had about only two different planting ratios, and then we did actually look at the difference between alternating and mixed row in that year. But then in 2019, we shifted over to looking solely at alternating rows, and then we expanded the number of ratios from two different ratios to four different ratios. And then we added in a component of fertilizer purely to see if we could still maintain some of our canola yield. Okay, so when we talk about intercropping pea and canola, a lot of times I think of this as one of the easier combination crops to get into. This is kind of the jumping point where you can figure out see if this works for you on your farm. And one of the big reasons is when you enter crop canola, there's a potential to reduce some of your lodging that is typically seen in a monocropped field pea setting.  I've done that one once that was not fun. The other aspect or one of the other aspects, as Mike mentioned with the LER value is we're looking at how can we increase our overall field efficiency? Can we go from about 100% to getting some over yielding? Like he said, about a 20%, 30% is pretty good. You're not going to see much greater than that. There is also the possibility within this pea and canola system to potentially reduce some of our input costs, especially when you start breaking the two crops apart. It has quite a few high inputs. And if you can combine that with some field peas, there is some chance to reduce some of those costs in a mixed system. There's also the chance to reduce some of your risks where you might have an area of a field that can grow canola better than it can field pea. If you can grow a straight field pea crop, you would probably have an area where you would have a bare spot. But now if you've got the canola in that system, you might be able to still have some ground cover. So your risk gets spread out over the two crops. And soil health is kind of a buzzword in agriculture right now. Everybody is paying attention to what's going on below our feet. We're trying to see how can we improve our overall soil health. And I believe that intercropping kind of plays a very pivotal role in this conversation. Because you're now going from growing one species of plant on a field to growing two species. You're improving your overall diversity. And I believe that there's more diversity going on below the soil with two different root interactions than we even really realize. So what are some of the advantages when we talk about pea and canola intercropping? Well, as Mike mentioned, you're going to have two different plants that have different seed sizes. And canola and pea, as you're very well aware, have very different seed sizes. So this makes separation relatively easy. If you have something that's similar in size, separation becomes a lot more of a hassle, a lot more time consuming. And maturity-wise, field pea and canola are fairly similar. I know there's a lot of talk about, well, your field peas are usually mature before your canola, and aren't you worried about some shatter or shelling out? Well, between the trials that we've hosted and personal experience, I've really only seen about a seven to 10 day difference between the maturities. And we're talking about that turn in color here. And with that, I've kind of kept that shelling out or that shatter in the back of my mind. I have not seen any physical loss on the field pea side yet. And there is a research article out there. It's an older one that actually talks about how a pea and canola system can reduce some of the flea beetle pressure that's typically seen in canola. One of the thoughts is that with that compound, I, the flea beetle can't really tell the difference between a field pea plant and a canola plant. So it typically avoids or will not attack the canola within an intercrop system as much. So as was mentioned, this trial, we conducted it down at our nest and valley location. That's where I am from about April until November. We hosted this trial on irrigation as well as non irrigated. We turned the sprinklers off and just had it side by side. Had a buffer zone so we weren't getting any, any interaction of that, of the overhead sprinkler on the irrigated side. Then we also had Carrington had the same trial. Mike shared a couple of those results. I'll go into depth a little more on Carrington's results as well. At Neston, we were purely alternating rows in Carrington. They were purely mixed rows due to equipment constraints. We had six total treatments. That's two inner or two monocrops and four ratio crops. Our full seeding rate of our pea was based on about 180 pounds to the acre or 317,000 seeds. That was for the variety Aciaguses and our canola was on 100% rate of four pounds, about 316,000 seeds. And we are using a clear field variety CS2500 CL. We had our ratios. This first number is the percentage of pea in the system. So 66% of that 180 pounds. And then the second number is the canola in the system. So 66% of the canola. And we looked at three different fertilizer rates. And the reason for this was our 2018 trial, when we put the canola and the peas together, we put absolutely zero fertilizer over the top of the system. So when we looked at the results, the canola was quite a bit lower than what we would have hoped for. It wasn't really representative of what you would see in a traditional field setting. So we added in three different fertilizer rates where we base everything off of the canola fertilizer requirements of about 120 pounds of N to the acre. And this is including what's available in your soil. So we took our soil test. We found what was available and then we adjusted to that to get up to our 120 pounds. On top of that, sulfur being an important factor in canola production, we put 30 pounds of sulfur down, but we used a potassium sulfate. This way we could have a true 0% nitrogen applied from fertilized. So if we have used an AMS product, we would have had a little bit of nitrogen from there. So we wanted to have a true setting where we are looking at purely what was available in the soil. This is what the trial looked like in 2019, I believe this picture or all three of these pictures were from. You can see our canola and our rose here. The spacing for the planter was about seven and a half inches. We're using a precision seed disc planter. We did because of some of our conditions and the constraints of our plot drill. We did have to run a light cultivation over the top, just to be able to have an adequate seed bed. So when we look at Nessan Valley, we're going to start by looking at the non irrigated since I'm assuming that most everybody who's here and who's online is a dry land producer. We'll talk about irrigation just a little bit later on because I think there is an importance to looking at the irrigated data, along with the non irrigated. So if we look at the data that is averaged over the three fertilizer rates across the four planting ratios, and across two years, we actually see that we were able to achieve over yielding compared to our monocropped peas and our monocropped canola. You can see there is there is some difference when we start reducing the amount of peas in the system. We actually do see that the canola is able to compensate for that loss in in pea production. Then we also see that the yields are not necessarily proportional to your seeding rate. So if you're seeding only 50% of your canola and 50% of your field pea, it's not really reasonable to expect that you're going to have a 50-50 yield. For instance, we actually see that at our 50-50 level, we have more canola than we do peas. And again, I think that's because canola is a little bit more competitive because it has that ability to fill in. I think that's the reason why we're seeing that here. So when we look at our fertilizer rates, we see a couple of different trends. We have our full 120 pounds of N and our zero pounds of N on this side. Our ratios, we're going to stick in the same order where we've got our monocrop pea on the left and our monocropped canola on the right. We'll start by working our way from our larger set of pea to our smaller set of pea from left to right. And that's going to kind of remain constant throughout these graphs. So one thing to note is that as our fertilizer rate increased from our zero to our 100, we see that our canola yields, as we would expect, increased. We did see a decrease too in our pea production where we had a fairly considerable pea yield over here to dropping down below 1,000 pounds in a lot of our mixers. The peas were inoculated, so we did have that going for us on the pea side. When we look at Carrington, this is the data from 2019 to 2020. And there are reports on the table. I believe the Carrington report is from 2020. And then I've got reports from from Nessan from both 2019 and 2020 so you can dig into those individual years a little bit more at each of those locations. And when we look at Carrington, we again see that there is an over-yielding aspect when we have our crops together. We see the similar result where we have, although it's not as dramatic in Carrington where they have more moisture. I think that's kind of one of the limiting factors that we had in Williston or in Nessan on our non-arrogated plots. The fact that we had less moisture, I think that was where we kind of saw the difference between our fertilizer rates. We don't see the effect as dramatic on the pea side of it, but yet on the canola you do see there is an increase when you go from a 0% to a full rate of fertilizer. And Mike kind of talked about the economics of it. Now that's probably the area where most people are excited about or are interested in talking about intercropping. Because this is going to be what you want to see. You want to see money in your pocket at the end of the year. You're not going to grow a crop to see money falling out of your pocket. You want to see money coming into your pocket. What I did here was I looked at the NDSU crop budgets for both pea and canola and kind of pieced them together based on our varied planting rates.  Now it's going to vary per year and per operation. But this is kind of a rough idea of what a gross expense would look like in a pea system and a canola system and then what it would look like across the different ratios. The reason for this spike is you're now introducing the cost of seed for both canola and pea into your system. So you have two seed costs instead of one singular seed cost. However, we again see in the commodity prices I used $10 bushel dry pea and 20 cent canola. The reason for this in between this 2018 to now time I've seen peas as low as $4 up to where they are right now about $14. So I kind of settled somewhere in the middle, same for canola range of 15 up to 45 cents. So I settled somewhere in the middle. And again, we see that with these prices we're going to have or it looks like we could have a potential net a positive net return. But what's more interesting is that when we actually add our combined ratios, we see a potential bump in our revenue. Now when we look at the fertilizer, one of the things to keep in mind here is when I talked about reducing input costs, this is one of the areas where we could potentially reduce some of our input costs. So if we can grow canola on 50% less fertilizer, we've lowered our gross expense that much. And right now when you're considering looking at $1,000 a ton for some fertilizer expenses or even more, that's a huge savings to be able to grow canola on less fertilizer and still get a bonus field pea. So overall, when we look at the dry land environments, this is this is kind of what we have seen this is looking at both the non irrigated nesting valley as well as the Carrington location, putting the data together. And this is just kind of some of the numerous numerical figures that we saw. But again the same same trend we see an over yielding between the two years over the mono crops. And these are the ratios that I'm most interested in this, the 66 all the way to the 33 and 66. This is somewhere in there. It is kind of where our sweet spot is going to be. But this is also going to change depending on your year and depending on your ultimate goals, and we'll talk about that kind of towards the end here. What's important to keep in mind in intercropping is that your goal from one year to the next is probably going to change. So what, what might be good for one year, one ratio might not be good for the next year. Now when we look at irrigation. I know there aren't a lot of the irrigated acres in North Dakota in general. But I still see irrigated production as kind of irrigated production and research as an important facet to give us the opportunity to look at in our particular environments or other environments. So what our potential may be in some of these, whether it's crop varieties or in some of our cropping practices, what some of our potential might be in a year where we have above average precipitation at optimal times. As talking with Jim, our soil scientist yesterday, we were talking about the 2019 year where we had above average precipitation, but it wasn't at the optimal time. September is not really when we want to see all of our precipitation. So irrigation gives us the chance to look at what some of our production practices may be able to do on a year where we actually do see some moisture. And I believe that this, the difference between the dry pea from the 0% to the 100% fertilizer was most noticeable within the irrigated systems from that 2019 to 2020. We were able to see that as you increased your fertilizer rate, your dry pea yields went down, but yet our canola yields were able to increase. I think there is something to note here about this middle area, as I mentioned earlier about reducing some of our input costs. Only we look at the irrigated side, one of the things to look at is that our gross expense is going to be considerably higher simply for the cost of irrigating. So where it might not be feasible between the 2019 and 2020 seasons with the yields that we saw in our monocropped field pea and our monocropped canola, it might not be feasible to grow those under irrigation because we're showing a potential net loss. However, when we have our inner crop areas, we show a potential to maybe even have a little bit of a net return, even with the added expenses of irrigating. That's even more noticeable within our fertilizer trees. Now, lodging was kind of mentioned as one of the overall goals to this inner cropping system. Can we reduce the lodging that's typically seen within a field pea setting and be able to have a more upright stand so we can cut a little bit higher off the ground, reduce the risk for running a rock through our combine. In Carrington, we looked at the mixed rows.  The thing with these numbers is to remember that these are subjective so it's the eye of the beholder, whereas I might score something out of four, somebody else might score something out of five. However, when we look at the monocropped peas, we see that they have a score just above a six, but whenever we throw canola into the system, we see a considerable reduction in the amount of lodging within our field peas. There was one ratio that Carrington had for one year. It was a 100% field pea with only a one third rate of canola. And the difference between a monocropped field pea and that 133 rate was we saw a drop from about a six point for lodging to about four points. So even adding one third of the rate of canola did reduce lodging in some aspect. When we look at Neson, we're looking purely at the alternating rows. Our lodging scores don't look as great. I think the biggest reason for this is 2020. In 2020, we had some herbicide damage to our field pea in the system, which caused some stunting. And while the plants were shorter, we didn't see as much lodging. If we were to break it apart and look at just 2019, there was a significant difference going from our monocropped peas to our intercropped ratios. We did see a drop in our lodging scores. We took a measurement in 2019 on the bottom pot, the lowest pot on the plant. And I believe we went from about an inch off of the soil level with the monocropped to I think we were able to get close to about two inches off of the soil level with the intercrops. In Langdon actually threw together intercropping trial this last summer. It provided some of the results. Brian Hansen also wrote up a detailed report. That's also a part of one of the packets that's out there so you can read through and see how intercropping worked in Langdon. They had one single fertilizer treatment. They didn't split it apart. So they had 55 pounds of end leftover in their soil and they applied 45 pounds of end over the top. So they had about 100 pounds. And in 2021, the results did not look super favorable. If you actually break down and look at the LER values, the LER values actually do show above 100%. They show about a 1.07. But they still weren't that great compared to growing a monocropped. However, if we were to look at the gross revenue and Brian chose $15 to the bushel for his peas and 36 cent canola. If you look at the gross revenue at those prices, we do see a slight advantage to growing our mixes. However, it kind of played around with those numbers a little bit. If you drop too much below there, you start to see not as great of an advantage. I believe that Langdon will be conducting this again next year. So it'll be interesting to see what their results are over two years. So between 2019 and 2020, we had our two locations, our three different environments, giving us about six years worth of data. We did see that the intercropped ratios were able to outperform the monocropped plots. We were able to reduce our lodging when we threw canola into the system, into our field pieces system, and the additional fertilizer did significantly help our canola, but yet it did hamper RP production. So I believe that there's kind of somewhere in the middle where we can reduce a little bit of our fertilizer cost, but yet still get an adequate canola yield. So now this next part I'm going to kind of transition into talking about some of my personal experience on large scale, going from a research plot size up to field scale. So when I started farming in about 2016 and 2019, we decided to make the jump into intercropping. We started with growing maple peas and canola together. However, as a result of September, we had flat maple peas and shelled out canola. So that didn't really work out well for us that year. So in 2020, we decided to go over to yellow peas and stick again with Clearfield canola. But we decided to try and reduce some of our fertilizer. So we only put about 60 pounds of N and 15 pounds of sulfur. We're using a URI AMS blend. We used a Clearfield canola that gave us a chance to use beyond for our broadleaf control. We did apply it along with some section. We did see some control on our weeds. I think our herbicide management, we're still trying to kind of figure that out on our operation within our intercropping. We only planted 60 pounds of peas and a full rate of canola. So we are doing about a third and end a full rate. In this particular year, we actually saw that our canola we were able to get about 25 bushel canola and about 16 bushel peas. And when you figure out the LER that comes out to about a 1.36. So it was a pretty decent number for that particular field. So we tried again in 2021. We applied even less nitrogen just because of where the fertilizer prices were and how dry everything was looking. I don't think I will do that again. That was about only 30 pounds of N and there just wasn't enough benefit to the canola. We had saw a considerable drop in our canola yield compared our dry peas still did fairly well. We didn't apply any amazomox this year. And then we did go in and desiccate mainly because in in 2020 I noticed that as I was combining I was taking off this much dry canola and then I was leaving. I was also taking in this much green stem through the combine. So I kind of wanted to see if I could maybe lessen the load on the on the machine a little bit by drying that stem down. I didn't see that it really helped a lot. So honestly, I don't know if if we're going to desiccate in the future or not, it'll kind of probably be on a per year basis. This is from 2020. This is what are what it looked like at the combine. In 2019, we drew a straight canola field and the canola looked nowhere near as good as it did in the inner crop situation. And then being a smaller operation, we actually invested in a small five tube quick clean system. And this is kind of what the separating look like we we put everything into the bin mixed and then we separated coming out of the bin. Going forward, I think we're going to try to separate right off the truck, rather than storing them in the bin together we did that this last year and that was a lot faster. So some of the lessons that we learned is that you need to pick in a primary crop. It's easier to clean off of the combine, rather than is to try to get it out of the bin and clean it. The quick clean is good, but I would like to have a second source. We're working, we're working on that right now. So hopefully we'll have some better ideas going forward. I just wanted to quick run through a potential scenario because I think this is important when it comes to identifying whether or not you want to grow peas and canola together. You need to identify which is going to be your primary crop, which crop do you want to have more of at the end of the season. In this case, we'll go with our dry pea. Well, then that makes picking our seeding rate a little bit easier because then we know we're not going to grow more canola in our field than we will peas. So we can instantly get rid of that potential ratio. And some of the research has shown this particular scenario favors almost favors a little bit more canola production than it does dry peas. So if we're aiming for peas, we can, we can cross those two out pretty quick. If I were to rank this in order, I would probably look at doing a 6633 first, this one second, and this would probably be my last option. And again, if we know that we're going for dry peas, we know that we're probably not going to apply a full rate of nitrogen. The idea of this is to show that we need to identify what our primary crop is. And when we can identify what that is, the rest of the management decisions become a lot easier. Because if you know that you're aiming for dry pea at the end, you know that you're not going to apply 120 pounds of nitrogen, you're going to probably be closer to applying nothing, or maybe just a little closer to 60 if you want to see some canola. But if you kind of start anywhere else, just pick one of these ratios without knowing which one you want to see the end of, you're probably going to see a little bit more disappointment towards the end. So my first point is to pick a winner pick a primary crop. With that I'd like to open up for any questions. We have time for for one question, which Lee, Justin can be part of the panel so more than that, you can ask in the afternoon but let's see if we have one any one question in the room line to do any cleaning beyond one run through the quick clean. So we then had to clean the peas again, just because the majority of the trash went off with the went off with the peas. So we had to run the peas back to the quick clean. So that's why I'd like to kind of have a secondary source. Was all fertility place at seeding time. Yes. We probably got one more in the room if you got one. Justin, you planted all in the same row for alternating. We did alternating. Yep. So we were using an old John Deere drill that I kind of did some engineering, and there's about a 12 inch spacing so we were 24 inches between the same same crop as a whole drill, but we had alternating and actually the picture on the front of the guide. The program for today that's out of our field. Was the fertility seed placed or mid row fertility was broadcast over the top. Okay, well thank you. Our next presenter is online I believe. Lana Shaw and she is the research manager at the Southeast Research Farm in Red Cross Saskatchewan. Lana earned her master's degree in agriculture in her bachelor's in pulse agronomy from the University of Saskatchewan. She has worked for about 20 years in agronomy extension and research roles, first with the provincial government in Saskatchewan and since 2010 with the Southeast Research Farm. Research manager, Lana has conducted various research trials on many different crops and has found a niche and mixed grain intercropping research since 2012. She is contacted extensively by producers who want advice and implementing intercropping across the prairies. Thanks for having me I do truly wish I could be there but I'm not so we'll make the best fit. I have to say I'm just really excited that you have so many people that are doing intercropping trials in North Dakota now which wasn't the case when I first started coming to North Dakota starting talking about intercropping. So, you know, I'm happy to see that. So you can tell, well I don't know if you can tell but that's not a picture of me I think that's a picture of Derek Axton in one of his intercropping fields it's one of my things I like to do is go follow farmers out into their fields and see what they're getting up to and then try to turn that into trials or, or fine tune trials to try to meet their needs better. So I refer to this type of intercropping as mixed grain intercropping, because there are other kinds of intercropping that aren't this, and, and I like to be precise about things. So when we're seeding together harvesting together I refer to that as mixed grain intercropping, and people ask me why are we doing this, and then we turn around and say why not why can't we try this. There are obstacles, the obstacles are surmountable with planning with organization there's, you know we've seen lots of examples of things already today that work, but there are ways that the intercropping can go badly. So that's where the research is important and small arm farm trials are important to try to figure out how to get the benefits of the intercropping and, and avoid some of the potential pitfalls and problems. So there's benefits to productivity yield. This isn't a, like was said earlier it's not a work work, it's an intensification in a way of the cropping system, not, we're not trying to take anything away from it particularly we're trying to intensify and add diversity, which can have impacts to the harvest reduction that can have impacts for lodging and harvestability nutrient efficiency isn't we've seen the, the use of nitrogen can change with this usually reductions. There's some risk mitigation to growing to crop simultaneously because some of them do better in certain conditions than others under drought conditions or wet conditions or pale or wind, whatever, and then ecosystem services could include things like soil health reductions in erosion. There's my B impacts on other biology out in the rural areas. So, this is one of my favorite inter crops that I grew back in 2017. The, I'm putting in line there that's 24 inch tall, two foot tall large green lentils that we grew in a really nice year with ground mustard. And that stuff stood pretty much that tall all the way to harvest I don't have the video up but that's what it was looking like at harvest and, and I can tell you those large green lentils were not standing. They were pretty flat when they were growing on their own so there's a nice example of the synergies and that that inter crop worked well, there's not always going to look that nice but when it when you hit it right, sometimes it does. As was mentioned earlier this is complex. It's the there's not simple answers it's not sort of a magic thing where you throw two crops together and all of a sudden magic happens. There's some really cool interactions, but it takes some effort to figure out the details of it. And, and it's something that people need to be prepared for if you're thinking you might want to do intercropping start early on the planning and the learning. Don't try to call people up in April and or may and say okay I decided I want to do intercropping. Now still a good time to start learning and planning but it is a good idea to start small. In terms of how we got here I wanted to cover that a little bit. The, there was some intercropping research being done, sort of. In the 80s and 90s Carrington was was a big component of that it was being done sort of across the prairies where they were growing a brassica with peas or a few different combinations that they were testing out but it was, it wasn't well funded it was just what I like to call road researchers trying out some things, and then there was a few road farmers trying it out. And so that you have cycles of trial and error that had gone on sort of prior to 2008 but then quite a bit between 2008 and 2017 there was, there was sort of an optic in the in people testing this out and and I think social media has helped people connect with each other so that they're able to share results better. Maybe that's what was missing in the early 90s is the ability for people to connect across geographical regions. So between 2018 and 2017. It was weird and definitely not trendy and people were looking at me like what the heck are you spending your time doing. And then but between 2018 and 2021 or now 2022. It's it might be weird but it's more trendy. It's more seen as as an option for the future that's worth trying to develop. But the commercial acres as far as the northern prairies started to build in 2018 in a more serious way. So I mean a little graphic of how this looks and I like I none of these parts would work as well. I don't think if they alone so the farmers working with researchers on adoption of intercropping has arguably accelerated things and yes I'm part of that and a lot of other there's other research people. And there's a lot of other people that that have been been very important in in this whole development because it's not easy. There's no big marketing push to make intercropping happen at a quality group level or a government level. It was just really a grassroots rogue thing where people started doing this and it's only just now starting to get the attention of like some of the bigger funders or government agencies. And so that's how that happened. I don't know if some thousands of acres but it's very hard to determine actually what the acres are we have there's data from like our Saskatchewan crop insurance but that's only based on what people are reporting to Saskatchewan crop insurance and there's definitely problems with that data set because people have incentives for not reporting properly to crop insurance. I've got connections with a lot of the chickpea fox growers because I started working on the intercrop that intercrop quite a while ago. So I started calling round and and trying to get in contact with people and this was my estimate of what the those commercial acres were doing. Like 2017 2018 the chickpea prices were very high so there was that increase the acres of chickpeas overall and chickpea fox and then chickpea acres overall for 2020 2021 were lower because of the chickpea price being lower. I'm not sure what they were for 2021. So it'll go up and down with the with the quantity prices, but there's still a there's a good level of interest from the farmers. We did a survey is started as a project with General Mills in 2020 during, you know, starting the pandemic and everything was going on. There was a survey project that we did. It started so it led to an interview and on farm project but some of you farmers might maybe remember filling this out we ended up with 61 online survey respondents that had intercrop previously. And, and we wanted to know a little bit about what they were doing. So, this is some of the, the distribution of where they were located geographically, and some of the intercrops that they had tried before so the most common one that they had tried 54% of those respondents had tried p canola 41% and tried chickpea flax. It's a very common one for them to try lentil flax P mustard lentil canola. I need to spend some more time going through this survey data that we had, but one of the things I could pulled out was that only about 10% of the respondents were strictly certified organic production. One of the things I deal with when talking to people about intercropping and intercropping funding is that they assume this is a very niche, organic, sort of an ideological technique, and, and it's far broader than that. So, you know, a great, a lot of the people were either transitional or would do some so called conventional farming where they're aiming for conventional markets or they might have some land that was certified organic production and some time that was not. So there's a mix but it really kind of reflects the, the acres that are out in in the prairies that up certain percentage are organic but the majority is is for conventional so called conventional markets. But more that we found out they were that the most frequent number of grain crops that they were growing that the median was 5.5 so so if you were trying to figure what was the most common one it would be between five and six basically. So they're growing quite a few grain crops in a given year. They're growing quite a few more and some not as much. So 85% were growing at least five different grain crops. So they probably have a four year rotation and but are growing five grain crops in a four year rotation that's probably the most frequent scenario, and then it's most in 2020. This was winter 2020. Early winter 2020 so they only had two to four years experience was the most common for respondents and there was about 13% that had more than four years experience. Now that we've had two more crop years since then. There's probably quite a few that have quite more experience so we should really redo this survey. But farms size range was 3000 to 5000. So kind of medium sized farms. There's sometimes some assumptions that this is a very small kind of hobby farm type of practices and that's really not reflected in the data that that we generated in this survey. And there's about 32% of them were had more than 5000 acres so substantial size farms. And of those people 230 acres was the, the average or the median of how much inter crops they had on on their farm in 2019. And there was about a dozen that in 2019 had over 1000 acres inter crop and that's across the regions that I said that's including in the UK and in the US and the three prairie provinces. So there's some some interesting information that we've kind of gleaned from that as far as who's doing intercropping. So let's talk around to a few different things that I thought would be relevant to this meeting and hopefully we're going to get into a bit of the data. A little later, but I just wanted to talk a little bit about when you're seeding inter crops that these are some of the things that you need to be thinking about. If you want to try doing this. What kind of seed placement are you going to get if you're seeding two different crops simultaneously, can you place the larger seed deeper through some means with existing equipment that you already have. Can you meter the two crops separately. You want to be careful of seed burn with any fertilizer that seed placed. It's a variable rate technology for nitrogen, and you could possibly wait till after emergence because the nitrogen required on say a peak canola is probably going to vary across the landscape, and it might benefit from variable rate nitrogen, more than a monocrop. You can preload some nutrients in the fall like maybe fast, but don't sabotage your nitrogen factory by putting on a lot of nitrogen, or by having a crop that's out competing the pulse. It's, you might if you want a canola crop with 5% peas in it. That's not a good scenario, you, that's that's not going to be efficient or sensible or have really any of the benefits of an inter crop. So they're most of the time the pulse needs to be pretty dominant, because it's not that competitive on in a high nitrogen. This is a picture from our chickpea flax inter crop trial that where we looked at mixed versus alternating rows we varied the flax rates and we also did with them. I think that year we did with them without nitrogen anyway we're doing a we have an ongoing trial where we're checking with and without nitrogen. And so that we're trying to get some of the answers to some of the questions that that were discussed briefly earlier, that's ongoing, we weren't able to run that trial in 2020 but I've got a little bit of data from that to present. And then how do you harvest it, you need to be flexible possibility of straight cutting it but you should have recourse to swathing and desiccation be prepared to do those things depending on conditions and the relative maturities of those crops. You're trying to optimize the value and quality of the combination of those crops, and that can get tricky under certain circumstances. You can connect with more experienced farmers if you need to for trying to decide when when you're if you need to go swathe when you were going to do that, or how much potential there is for shattering, which you can somewhat influence with varieties and crop selection. Generally you're setting the combine for the larger seed, turn the wind down or the fans down a little so that you're not pulling the small seed out. That's a general rule, but again connect with farmers that have experience to get more specific settings on that. And then if you start with small areas for your commercial production that's makes it, it gives you more ability to do some trial and error. So crop rotations a lot as though this is something that you know we haven't thought of that you're going to rec crop rotations crop rotations don't require monocultures they don't require a single crops to be grown in sequence we can grow these inter crops in sequence with inter crops just fine, while still keeping training the ability to space out crops in time to reduce pathogens. That's the main, the main thing that are the crop sequence crop rotations are doing is is spacing out individual crops in time so that you're breaking pest cycles. You still do that with inter crops. You don't have to inter crop everything this is something you can dabble in unlike if you're switching to organic you kind of need to get in or get out this person can dabble into inter crops and also have monocrops. So people that are heavy into intercropping as a commercial production are still doing at least half of their acres as monocultures of something maybe under seated but used oftentimes just serial monocultures. Don't turn a three year crop rotation into a two year crop rotation by putting the two other crops together. Not, but that's just not advisable. And keep in mind that we still have a fan of my C's issues with a lot of these they're still co group risks they're still fleet beetle risks doesn't so planning the crop sequences with those in mind. You can still do that with intercropping just be aware what is hosts and what is not. If the earlier presentations they talked a little bit about like the cutting height and the residue that you might leave after with some of these and yes, a lot of the reason for wanting to do that, this is not putting a rock through the combine because nobody likes putting rock through the combine. Another advantage is the snow trapping erosion reduction stubble for cereals. This isn't something that I have data on. It's we just not have the ability to do that in small plot trials or generate data but this is something that intuitively is making sense for the farmers and it's sometimes the reasons why they're very interested in doing intercropping because they're trying to have more robust residue. So there's more protection for the soil. As far as grain separation with heard a little bit about these rotary grain cleaners this is like an entry level intercropping like first step you want to try intercropping you get some of these rotary cleaners. Once you're scaling up to bigger acres. There's usually some of that some additional investment in something that's more suited to to larger volumes. But if you're doing a quick clean separation in the fall. This is kind of what it looks like you've got augers going every which direction and this could either happen sort of right during the harvest season or a little while after the mixed grains are being safely stored by farmers in bins, but still it's something where we don't have the parameters for how to safely store intercrop so just be cautious and when in doubt put some air through it. So I've been doing intercropping research since demonstration since 2012 and research I guess since 2013 chickpea flax is the one of the first ones that really caught my interest. And so we're trying to find a balance between the crops and that's where the research is crucial because we can test all kinds of different things. So then with replication and statistics more so than than is really feasible on farm. In 2019, we did a trial with with oats and peas there was some interest from the industry, particularly in in figuring out our oats and peas intercrops feasible. So the pea intercrop isn't as much of a home run as the chickpea flax or even the pea canola as far as land equivalency ratio because oats is quite competitive. Sometimes the peas, don't compete that well. Good example of that is here this is our outlook that location in in 2019 is actually an irrigated location on for all. Potato ground like potato stubble, very, very high nitrogen potato stubble. So the oats were just monster they were doing great. The peas had kind of had a fail and we're barely even present. And this is the kind of scenario where yes we're growing an intercrop, but this is not a very good intercrop, nobody would be happy with this in the end so want to avoid that how do you avoid that excess nitrogen is is, you know, avoiding fields excess nitrogen is one of the ways this one here read verse for 2019. This is also not a good intercrop scenario, like the peas did relatively well I had a nice old crop, why are my intercrops really not performing very well. Part of it was bird damage the birds like to sit on the peas and eat up the oats I think the birds flew away with quite a bit of my oats. And so, you know that may not actually reflect what was there but it didn't work out that great. So if current it was kind of had the same thing where there was hardly any peas and there was lots of oats. And it I think the land to cool and see ratios for this would end up being okay, but it's a very small amount of keys to separate from the oats and it might be it's not not quite what you're hoping for. But this Indian head scenario is a pretty typical outcome, I think, or expectation of an outcome where. So this 2550 75 that was the seeds per square meter. So, whereas like two to 300 probably closer to 300 would be the, the, for this situation was 200 seeds per square meter, but you could definitely go to 300 normally for a monocrop oats. So we're talking about less than half rates for all of these but the very low densities of oats resulted in more peas, and then as you added more and more oats you got less peas, and, and more oats. But at these levels here they were quite similar in total yield it just depended. It made a little difference on how much keys versus oats you got. So that was really some interesting outcome on that. Here's the land equivalency ratios for those sites. Some of those likes with current the L erce a lot of those were over one Indian head some of those were over one outlook for they were technically over one but that just because your land equivalency ratios are relatively high. That doesn't actually mean that this was a commercially successful venture. It's just reflects that the monocrop P yields at outlook were dismal, and, and, you know, 90%. There was probably similar P yield in the, the outlook one so you start adding percentages together it looks great but really it wasn't. And of note here is, is the monocrop out had higher nitrogen fertilization than the inter crop treatments most of the cases we're about half rate nitrogen in the inter crops versus whatever was the recommended rate for the open monocrops. So yes, like the L erce are are not fantastic here but we've had a savings of the nitrogen that was actually used on these inter crops. So there's it depends what you're trying to achieve with this. And we're still working out the some of the details of it. As far as gross value. So it's really depending on treatment and location that the total value for this Indian head site was very similar between all the treatments. So what you're harvesting was kind of worth the same, but there might be reductions in the costs of the inter crops so and I broke that out. So this is sort of that your variable costs of production that I tried to break out the sea cost was a little bit higher in the inter crops, depending on which rate you would use of course. The nitrogen fertilizer was about 1750 lower that was this was down a couple of years ago. So prices of fertilizer different now of course. I figured was probably about $18 for a separation cost per acre. And we don't, we didn't determine the differences in pesticides. So that would be an over and above if you haven't sprayed this P od inter crop with anything and you would normally spray your monocrops with something then that's an additional savings if you would normally spray with fungicides and wouldn't with an inter crop. That's an additional savings, but the net look to be that the inter crop had a higher cost of 950 without taking into account any of the pesticides so good to keep and good to keep in mind that the higher your total yields are the higher your separation costs is going to be we after talking to farmers we figured that it was about 18 or is about 25 cents per bushel is your really cheapest options for inter crop separation. So just good thing to keep in mind. The there's some so there's some positive functionality, but you've really got to keep an eye on the separation costs, and that there's not much for herbicides available in this system at all. So, being careful on that it's there's likely more competition, compared to the peas at least. So, that's was a little bit information about that. We had a general Mills project, Luke Struckman kind of ran this as a contract for us. You had interviews with 25 vendor croppers in Canada, the US and UK. And then we ran some on farm sort of like living labs demonstration things in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota. I think there might have been even a Minnesota one. So they had your group grew out mono crop and P out into crop side by side for grain production. So we were this center crop is very suitable for forage, but we were trying to because general Mills doesn't do forage they do oats for grain we were trying to look specifically a potential for oats for grain. Overall, there was no consistent difference in the yield out test weight or other quality parameters between the mono crops and the the inter crops. But about it depends on your perspective. There was no reductions in the quality caused by the intercropping that I think I see that as a positive, because it's entirely possible that you could have, you know, thinner oats or due to different competition you might have some quality problems there's no indication of quality problems. There wasn't a clear benefit as far as as plumpness but I've seen in some of our other trials that there was, there's some situations where we're getting more plump kernels in the oats with the inter crops but it's kind of situation and mother depended. So, one of the conclusions from looking at all these on farm demonstrations was that to get a good outcome with this inter crop they needed to stay under 60% of a normal density, and have a good component of peas for this to be functional, because they were trying to target producers General Mills and Patterson grain kind of customers that it were already growing out, and they were thinking all just add in a little bit of peas and maybe that'll be nice. And a big old crop with a little bit of peas in it doesn't have the same efficiency and functionalities and inter crop as something where you've got quite a lot of peas with maybe a half rate or less of boats in it. So, good to keep in mind, and that was sort of a thing that some of the people that participated had learned so if you want to go full on notes then go full on notes, but if you want to interrupt and you need to leave room for the peas. Otherwise it's a smother crop of votes. Chickpea flax intercropping I, when we were, I wasn't sure how, how much I want to get into the chickpea flax because I didn't want to repeat things have already been said earlier but then I, after hearing the presentation I threw in some slides. So, I've been doing the chickpea flax intercropping for quite a number of years, and we haven't analyzed the 2021 data yet so I don't even have that we didn't run this trial in 2020 so I'm going back to the 2019 data. So, as far as the effective nitrogen on this chickpea flax. There was a little bit, there was more flax and a little bit less chickpeas where we added in, which resulted in a little bit more yield total than where we had no nitrogen but whether, whether that was actually worth putting the nitrogen on or not is is questionable. Um, so this was the inter crop values. Based on whatever prices I thought was appropriate at the time I made these slides up. And so this is our mixtures at five pounds and acre 10 pounds and acre 19 pounds and acre. Five 10 and 19 this is alternate rows. And this was the overall average. So, the, the value of the crops does vary a little bit, but it's quite similar between the alternate mixed rose. With the, with the addition of nitrogen. So you can see the flax is doing relatively well in where the hot there's high density there's quite a lot of flax, not nearly as much chickpea. So, what outcome you want to get can be influenced, definitely by the amount of flax that you're putting in. And in this trial, we didn't we use the same chickpea rate like basically a full monocrop chickpea rate on all the treatments we only vary the flax. So we weren't doing a substitution where it's like 5050 and 3365 for purposes of this comparison, all its full on chickpea with addition of flax. So that's where the monocrop flax value was. And the chickpea monocrop value was at 500. I think the flax mono value that would probably move that with nitrogen added we did compare fertilized and not fertilized flax. But I think it's most fair to compare to a fertilized flax because that's what most people would do. So when you're not adding nitrogen. This is what happened. So here's the flax with no nitrogen added and the chickpeas. Of course with no nitrogen added. So we're under the no nitrogen comparison, the intercrop does look quite a bit better. That's entirely to be expected. So when comparing monocrops and intercrops, you've really got to watch what apples and oranges you're comparing to as far as nitrogen additions. Because LERs look really good where you're not supplementing nitrogen for intercrops but when you start supplementing and not as good. But notable here is that the flax here wasn't able to pick up the slack quite as well under the no nitrogen condition so we're actually getting a reduction in in the total yield. So what's going on because we've got some nitrogen deficient flax is very dense and it's out competing the chickpeas but the chickpeas isn't able to quite give this give the flax enough nitrogen to be productive. Whereas at some of these other densities it's a bit better. And then the alternating rows there was a bit less of that effect going on for a reason. So this is the intercrop values. We're getting whatever this there's just a little bit of a bump in value with the addition of nitrogen in the intercrops. They're surprisingly fairly comparable for the total value and that doesn't always happen sometimes the chickpea monocrops do great. They're all of them out of the water, but it really varies from year to year so yields and the L er's and outcomes from a given site year to another is can vary why why very widely. So the same year we did do disease comparisons. Or disease assessments using the scale that was recommended by Michelle Hubbard Michelle Hubbard's a collaborator on this truck trials allowed by Bill me and funded by I should say by our agriculture development fund and sauce fox and Western Greens Research Foundation. Anyways, I was very pleased. This was the second year that we had seen a statistically significant difference in the disease rating due to intercropping. So this zero here I'll explain this a little zero means we had zero flax this is pounds per acre of flax so the addition of flax. Was was a statistically significant factor and the more flax there was the less disease there was. This is not surprising, but what it is. It's hard to get diseases to behave properly when we've got them right next to each other and the disease is kind of spread around this is a foliar disease. And the fact that it doesn't matter which ones are beside we're getting statistically significant differences even on these small plots. It's likely that these differences that seem kind of maybe small are larger when you get out into field scale because of the edge effects and the variability that we have in the small plots. So there was no differences by August things got a little more messy and variable by then there was differences in July. And if we had had the conditions that were more conducive to disease development through August we may have seen bigger effects. So this is the same trial but at now for it in 2019 and I know there was questions earlier on what effect is alternating versus mixed rows have and what's what were the row spacing effects. And this chart is really in an interesting one to look at to try to try to answer that question. So there were two statistically significant factors at Melford in 2019 and like Melford would be like almost like trying to grow chickpea flocks in Fargo like nobody has any business growing chickpeas in Melford. But the reason that we're doing it is we want to get the biggest disease differences that we can under high humidity high moisture conditions and that's what happened in 2019. So as flux rate increased, we had there was a reduction in in disease. It was. So mixed is the, the more forest green and alternating roses the more grass green ones. And so you can, there was a statistically significant effect of the mix versus alternating rows, but it really looks like the biggest part of that effect was from the this does include the monochrome. So the the row spacing made a big effect with the monochrome, a little some difference with the very lowest flux rates. So if you get to more of these more agronomically relevant rates, like the 10 and the 19 pounds an acre of flaps, there's, there's a very little difference. So I want to be careful on on saying, you know that we're showing clear benefits. There's an influence, but it may not really be having a large effect at the rates that are important for that that we're actually putting into use. So the good news with that is that you can see how you want. If you can't do alternating rows and you want to be able to make strokes. That's fine. So, I take that as some good news but the trial is far from being finished so we'll see how it goes. As far as gross value and what effect the intercropping has this chart shows a whole bunch of different sites over over several years and outcomes. And so there were some situations where where the gross revenue increased by adding flux, like here and here, red verse 2019. There was a few where that happened. There's also some where adding flux drop the gross value. But this is kind of crazy. Some of this is kind of crazy town land, where we are growing chickpeas in areas where we have no business growing chickpeas, we happen to hit a year where the chickpea monocrops did fabulously well. But these are not areas where you can consistently grow chickpeas and have them have decent yield or quality. So, keep that in mind, like this does not take into account quality. This is assuming all of these chickpeas are lovely quality. So we're going to keep that in mind as we go. And also we need to keep in mind like how much money do you actually need to get in order to hit a nicely profitable crop and at $500 an acre. There's a lot of these intercrops that are still hitting a nice profitability level with relatively low risk as far as disease. So you keep your eye on the ball as to what you're trying to achieve does not factor in quality differences. Okay, put a pin in that. Here we go chickpea quality. So some of the same locations, these were the ones where we saw differences due to treatments in the chickpea quality. And these sites that did fantastically well for yield, like this Indian head, some of these had huge differences in chickpea. So this is the monocrops here, rather high incidence of green seed, which is reflected by those differences that Claire talked about in the maturation and the evenness of maturation. And it this is the fact does affect the maturation. So some amount of, of having flax in there as an intercrop change the quite dramatically improve the chickpea quality, and we don't get paid for garbage chickpeas. So if you want good grade chickpeas, this is, this is a way to achieve that there's, we've got good results over quite a few site years showing showing that effect. So, okay, this, this is the, this is the chickpea flax trial that I've just mentioned. There, there was a chickpea flax and P master trial Dan Melanie read had a has a master's project just, she's just finishing writing her thesis. So that those results will be available soon. We started a new trial. Dr. Kui Lu is leading it that involves P out and P canola we're doing and 15 isotope nitrogen determinations to try to end three different nitrogen schemes to try to figure out what how P out and P canola is performing under those different regimes. And I've got a perennial regress and oh project this, this ongoing. And then Dr. Shama Chatterton has a trial at our location where we're trying to see if intercropping has an effect on a family sees root rotten. So far that's not looking super promising, but we're it's a work in progress. So, at this stage you've been inundated with a lot of information, probably a little overwhelming. This is a big change there's no doubt about that. People want things to change in their industry. There's a lot of times people are not very happy with how things are on their farm. If you do want to change. This is, this is a fairly big one. And you've got a lot more resources and information and people to go to now than there was five years ago. I see this as a way of trying to get away from some of the no win conversations about monocrop rotations like people with their two year rotations that are saying, I can't make money on growing peas or I can't make money on some of these other crop options. I think sometimes you can pair a couple of, you know, higher risk or problematic crops, put them together and they do better together, like a chickpea flax. Then they went on the wrong because I've no business growing chickpeas in our area, but our chickpea flax does relatively well quite consistently. So it changes what kind of crops people can profitably grow by tearing them up. So where do you start? You need to think about what you were trying to achieve with this. And yes, yield is important, but profit profitability is also a ball that you need to keep an eye on. What does success look like to you? Calibrating your eyes to adjust to seeing two crops that are kind of variable across a landscape and there'll be different varying ratios of those out in the field during the summer. That's a process that we're used to seeing success as a really clean crop with only one species in it and it looks super uniform and it doesn't really look very hardly variable across the whole field. And intercrops do not look like that. They look more variable. And that's a feature of the system, not a bug. So adjust your expectations for more diversity and it's not terrifically predictable. Some things are, you can influence the balance between those crops, but what you're going to get in the end is not as predictable as it is for a monocrop in terms of what the balance is between those crops. Give yourself the gift of time and patience for learning how to do this. Instead, like if you're going to just give it one year, try something, if it doesn't work out fantastic, then quit. Well, maybe save yourself the time and don't do it because this is going to take some time to optimize for your area. So start small and work it out. But resiliency and profitability are really bottom line when thinking about intercrops. So managing your risk, reducing or managing your exposure to input costs and input cost fluctuations, which is super relevant right now. So managing profitability because if you're not profitable and not similarly profitable to your neighbors, then you're not going to be able to compete for land or, you know, access whatever you need to be able to continue farming. So I've heard this called the intercrop game. Sometimes people will, you know, start brainstorming out crop options and then you can try to figure out what are the potential pitfalls or what are the synergies that are possible between different crops. There's tons and tons of possible combinations. Some of them of course are more common than others. Canola peas is a very common one. It can be problematic on maturity standpoint sometimes and isn't necessarily one of the lowest risk combinations. Lentil and mustard is one that I've done that works quite well. There can be some marketing issues around having mustard in lentils because it's an allergen. So you want to be aware of that and careful with it. Flax and chickpea we've heard lots about. That's a cool one. Lentils and Camelina is one that has been working quite well for people but so far there's not really been any research on that one. It's nice as far as there's almost, there's very little for weak control options in Camelina. So you can do a conventional lentil like a whatever kind of lentil you want really with the Camelina. Camelina is super small seeded. It thrashes quite nice. Camelina is prone to apparently prone to shattering. So that's something to be careful on. It's quite a bit earlier than a canola usually. So it's not one I have a lot of experience with. And why do we have the pulses in the middle? They're kind of cornerstone to these inter crops and their functionality. You can do an oil seed in a cereal like a flax and wheat say or something like that, but the nitrogen fixation is an important part of what builds the synergies in these inter crops. And yes, if you want, you can add in some kind of an understory thing like some clover under seed a forage seed or something if you really want to have more green growth going into harvest or something you can add that into inter crops if you want to and because there's a very limited herbicides you can choose an inter crop that could have a relatively good fit. You might out compete the whatever you're putting in the understory but it's possibility. So, for when deciding what inter crops you want to grow, you want to think about what do you want to or need to be able to spray if you've got some some bad issues with some resistant needs that are that you really need to manage then you need to figure out if there's any herbicide options available in inter crops that you can use like self enter zone works good and chickpea flax for at least in in Canada we're allowed to use it on on both those crops. There's some of the older, most of them are pre emergence herbicides that you can use on some of these inter crops but it's limited. It's one of the reasons that we'll do an oil seed pulse inter crop a lot of the time because there's usually some grassy herbicide that we can use for at least some grass control. So figure out what you can actually sell or use because in some areas there's there's very little market for something like fox or there's maybe little market for a camelina. So figure out what you can actually profitably market or use as a cover prop seed or there's a there's numerous options of ways to to use some of these, but it takes a bit more imagination. And what can you separate efficiently, don't put things together that you need separate that can't be effectively separated and you need to keep in mind the amount of cracking and damage that could happen under less than ideal circumstances like flax and lentils lentils people will sometimes do but you have to be very careful that the lentils don't crack or you have a bunch of cracks lentils in your flax they're difficult to clean up. Nobody wants to buy flax with a whole bunch of lentils in it. So, keep in mind, keep in mind that you've got two crops to watch for herbicide residuals. So, go careful on that. And then you think about what volunteers you're likely to encounter.  So some of these canola volunteers could be a big problem, or, you know, you have volunteer wheat in this maybe you'll be able to separate out the volunteer wheat and it works out okay. You just want to keep that in mind. So competitive ability is important it's something we kind of play around with over time when working with inter crops and you don't think maybe a fox being not competitive, but it is relatively a lot of the time more competitive than the pulses. So you you watch that there's differences in variety in market class traits. So you might find there's some of the viney full leaf type peas seem to be a lot more competitive than the semi leafless grain type varieties that we typically have for the yellow and the green market classes. So you can watch that that that can influence the seeding rate so a forage P or maple P the seeding rate for those are the suitable seeding rate for those are likely to be lower for plants per square meter per square foot than it would be for for a semi leafless type. And then you're really wanting to try to match maturity, like on the peas and oats the oats are quite a bit later than the peas. And that was, you know, substantial amount of time probably about 10 days some of them that that the peas were pretty much ripe and the oats were not quite there. And yeah they held up okay, but it's when you can get it as close as possible on matching maturity between those crops that's going to give you much less risk. There's harvest loss potential do the shattering, say a pea canola that canola is usually later if those peas start shattering then maybe 10 or 20% of your peas are on the ground. That's not a very good scenario. Even if it's more profitable you're likely to be unhappy as a farmer if a whole bunch of your crop just fell in the ground. So keep in mind, recourse to swathing might avoid that. Of course swathing sometimes results in swats going away so there's always some sort of risks, and then watch your moisture on those two crops and try to take them off when they're relatively safe to store each one of them. I think the social component of this intercropping full sort of movement if I can call it that is important. And the event that you guys are involved in whether in person or or virtually right now is one of those ways that that that you can facilitate the growth of this and facilitate your own learning, facilitate your own comfort level because it's almost like we need to have a good social license for intercropping is okay. And it's, you know, it's cool and a good way to intensify and, you know, sort of add a new component to your farm, instead of you're doing craziness and you're making the rest of us farmers look bad like you can encounters those kind of comments that you shouldn't be doing that.  If you need a while that's fine too, but there's there's a really interesting social component to this that that I enjoy, and I'm missing out on right now. It's not nearly as fun doing this at my house. So, this is how to get ahold of me. Our organization is partly funded by the provincial government through the agree on program. There's a bunch of different funders involved in some of this this work, but I'm going to send some links out to some of these reports to Audrey to forward to anybody who wants access to them so give her your email if you want to get access to some of the reports later. Okay, and it's I'm standing between you and lunchtime so I will be done now.


Welcome back and hope that you got some time to spend on the last class which is Mayer's theory which is a formidable class. We are this is the second time we are doing it, first time we do it little bit more detail but it is a very difficult thing and we I decided to review it once more along with the revision of diatomic monotomic and diatomic and polyatomic gases because these are fairly new things to students of chemistry for whom this course is designed and so in chemistry we do a large amount of body of work on phase transition from the beginning of chemistry from Van der Waals theory of gases from phase transition gas to liquid transition. See in our even undergraduate chemistry there is a big, big chapters and on phase equilibrium phase transition and precipitation in chemistry, physical chemistry, organic chemistry laboratory we are all the time doing melting as a taste of purity and identification. So phase transition varies dear to physical chemistry and physical chemistry is mandated to explain this. Now there is always this curiosity to why how the rain drops form, how gas goes to liquid then of course how ice melts and water goes into ice. What are the molecular processes? These are only present they are all around us but it turned out explanation of them understanding of them challenged the intellectual ability of man to a very high degree and the people and the scientists who are involved in doing these are some of the best minds of that we have produced in entire civilization. So I already described and I hope you spend some time and I encourage you to spend more time in understanding Mayer s theory. How intermolecular interactions entered the picture to Mayer a function which gives us real series and also tells us how one can envisage or picture gas to liquid transition as small, small clusters in the in the in the group like for instance in this room small, small clusters coagulate together to form a gigantic big cluster almost the size of the total number of particles of the system which is the liquid phase which is the correct picture is that exactly what happens that when a gas goes into liquid then many, many clusters of smaller size quite small size actually can be clusters of the size of only maybe 20, 30 molecules not more than that but many, many of those clusters most of them still monomer and dimer they coagulate together in a very short temperature span to form a gigantic cluster of avocado number of molecules. This happened in so shortly and such a short temperature range that we call it a singularity we call it that the properties some of the properties diverge for example you calculate specific heat it diverges. So phase transition has then characteristics of the divergence that things just fantastic things happen but then how do I explain these fantastic things? Mayer's told us okay think in terms of small, small clusters and they suddenly come together to become big clusters but I told you the Mayer's theory however beautiful it is it breaks down because we do not get the cluster integral three level cluster integral we told us how to do these things but those things are very difficult we cannot do even now today we cannot calculate irreversible cluster integral for the inner zone systems of something more than the size of the so for example 10 particles together there is a huge number of graphs that cannot be which cannot be evaluated and 10 particles doubly connected will be 30 dimensional integral which just is not possible actually people in inner zones have done only up to 6 that by he and Hoover who did this beautiful work you know landmark work in about 30 years ago but nothing more has been done after that. However at the 1937 38 and the same time when Mayer was developing his game changing theory of in terms of graph theory in terms of clusters in terms of cluster integral one brilliant physicist called Landau Landau was developing a simple phrenological theory to describe the phase transition and this is called outer parameter theory that went on to become the mainstream of phase transition study that went on to develop many languages and went on to giving probably 10 or 15 Nobel prizes in this area of phase transition. So we will briefly describe Landau theory we did it once before but I am going to do it again probably somewhat from different perspective and as I go on this way I will go I will repeat things course will go a little advance then go back and then again go forward so in that way as I said painting is a way to learn things. So this is a this our picture of Landau the great Landau and did many many things and this is kind of a phrenology diagram which came was inspired by Landau that if gas to liquid high temperature in the temperature large it is gas where molecules are far from each other but in a liquid the molecules that which are so this is the kind of droplet the small clusters from Mayer's theory this one gigantic cluster that forms at the phase transition but look at that there is a barrier it has to go over the barrier and this free energy by going around the free energy barrier is also very difficult process but the appearance of this double minimum is the essence of the Landau theory and this when plotting free energy against the appropriate quantity on the x axis free energy y axis is called Landau's land energy landscape. So we will now do so this is kind of thing from the book that phase transition ubiquitous it manifested large and very important thing of phase transition large experimentally detectable change large change macroscopic change so macroscopic change but the macroscopic change takes place in point a small change that means I change something very small but something very big happens that means this is a small change in a control parameter needs to huge change like the temperature at 100 degree centigrade I just make it I reach 99.9 and make 100 that 0.1 degree centigrade needs to huge change similarly I 0 degree centigrade I make it 0.1 degree centigrade I it makes so the real thing to emphasize that note that that infinitesimal change infinitesimal change leads to a macroscopic change in specific it enthalpy entropy of parts of the system this is the subject of phase transition this is in great great importance in most branches of natural and biological science like it helix called transition in DNA and protein protein folding these are kind of a cooperative phenomena so what is the language here the degree with that the classification there is that many many molecules kind of acting together collectively to give rise to this act of macroscopic change so this is one of the most fascinating field of condensed matter science the natural science that how molecules talk with each other the molecules collectively change over one phase like gas through another phase like liquid phase so how do I understand that may I try to understand from intermolecular potential that is detailed that gives us some picture how things are happening but that fails to give us to fail to describe the generality of the phenomena so we need description which is simpler but which is general which captures the essence of this macroscopic change in a in a thermodynamic property due to microscopic change in infinitesimal change in a control parameter like temperature or density so that is what Landau did so I described it before but I will describe it a little bit more physically this time so phase transition are very common liquid liquid solid magnetic transition ferromagnetic paramagnetic transition ferroelectric and all these things well known examples are all these are a many many phase transitions here so then we study then we ask with three questions what is what why and how what are the characteristics of the phenomena what is the phase transition why does it happen that is a why how does it happen so how essentially brings a dynamics which we will do later not today and that we will describe why how do I describe in terms of phase transition like I go back to in years in years it has come together but how does it happen manifested in how do I describe in free energy this is what Landau did and so Landau said so there is a hint that I this will be given to you there is a large number of examples paramagnetic ferromagnetic phase transition liquid solid gas liquid order disorder in very common in solid phase like alloys binary mixtures again they phase separate in polymers in superconductivity in super fluidity is all in elix coil there is just phase transition is all around us and you have to give proper importance to phase transition not just because it is all around us but phase transition brings in introduces some of the most common and most useful language to physical this is something we learn from like the concept of order parameter the concept of singularity and these languages free energy expansion free energy landscape the all the language you routinely use they started in the field of phase transition so I am talking a very elementary language but those are the newcomers this is a I must emphasize is a very very important thing so these are the examples phase transition let me go through so the all these examples this is my favorite is huge is characterized by this continuous characterized by this continuous change of macroscopic variables that is finite change of a macroscopic variable due to infinitesimal change so the thing to know finite large scale change due to infinitesimal change small change in some variable and this is the hallmark of phase transition so if you say what is the phase transition then this is the phase transition what this is the definition of phase transition what so the I accident why now these are the examples we already did pressure against density in mayors theory you know this then we always ask this in the our interview of one decade new students and then we ask pressure versus a plot pressure versus a temperature plane and this is solid liquid and gas gas here and in our classroom we find really very interesting things pure students put gas here solid here and liquid here and all kinds of things they do but this is the phase diagram so this pressure temperature when these are triple point and these are critical point you know all these things then the another representation so there are three representation these temperature against density then this another with empty so this is the gas liquid persistent then this beautiful way goes so this is the solid so I can describe the same phenomenon three ways it says something very interesting and new like here it says when this kind of van der Waals loop or the kind of spin order or instability here it because these are the coexistence line these are the layer lines along with gas and liquid coexists liquid and solid coexists solid and gas sublimation across that that coexists and here it says how gas liquid crystals are showing together in a beautiful way including the this this parabolic shape inverse parabolic shape which we showing you the bell shape which showing you the critical point and all these things so these are the three representation so phase transition deals with these kinds of graph this is for gas liquid this simple thing I can draw identical thing for almost magnetic systems now as I said one a very important contribution of the phase transition that goes on to many different fields of condensed metastime or even protein folding or any other things is order parameter what is an order parameter and order parameter is chosen as a quantity which is zero before the transition but becomes non-zero afterwards a clear example is point by liquid for the transition where is the order also magnetic transition that is magnetization is an order parameter so a system in a zero magnetization non-magnetic before the transition after the magnitude when it becomes ferromagnetic in magnetization goes up large so gas liquid or liquid solid the entropy is so this is solid this is liquid entropy diverging then you look at specific it that is diverging so order parameter is a quantity that is zero before the transition becomes non-zero is solid we will have some more examples there for example if I so liquid solid so there is a random system then that becomes periodic and periodic I can expand it in the reciprocal that is vectors you know this expansion and this is a fractional density change and these quantities are the connected removal of factor but these are the order parameters so in this example phi naught phi g are the order parameters then in the gas liquid transition is zero liquid minus rho gas that is the order parameter magnetic and ferromagnetic transition magnetization is order parameter gas liquid this difference liquid solid we find out phi g order parameters solgents because it is order parameter so it is a quantity which is zero before the transition becomes non-zero after the transition this was land out deflation now why did land out define it why did land out define it okay land out defined it because land out had in mind to describe a phase transition so land out was looking for a quantity see in in in physics when you want to describe a change we want to quantify the change why you want to quantify change why because if I have to describe a free energy then I want a smallest parameter this smallest parameter is the one that I can expand free energy about and that smallness parameter is the order parameter it is something which is zero and then become non-zero so I can do a Taylor expansion in the smallest parameter so order parameter becomes the smallest parameter in my Taylor expansion and that was the idea of land out and that is a very beautiful idea that now there was when this was done it is another brilliant this is name is Erenfest Erenfest came up with it he noticed something very interesting he noticed that that the there are some phase transitions where entropy undergoes a jump like melting and then liquid solid transition away from the critical gas liquid transition away from the critical point there is a jump like you know you know in water pipe 40 kilo kcal per mole kilo kcal per gram for gas liquid 80 kilo kcal per gram for calorie gram or kilo I do not forget that but they are fine actually however when you go to critical point then specifically diverges a not change in that entity and then magnetic transition paramagnetic free magnetic transition if in the absence of a magnetic field it is a transition which is again continuous but has this divergence peculiar behavior super fluidity has this peculiar transition then order disorder transition solids like brass can show these characteristics this shows these characteristics where second order properties of free energy undergoes divergence but in the melting is the first order property is entropy is the first derivative of free energy so first order property means when I have an order parameter and I control parameter I change that control parameter first derivative of free energy becomes discontinuous so in interest say let me now define capture this universality across the phase transition that first order phase transition or those phase transitions where first derivative of the free energy is dismantled and second order with the second derivative of the free energy they expect order parameter or control parameter become discontinuous suddenly everything kind of falls in place oh I now I say when I say first order phase transition I know the characteristics of first order phase transition whatever that the material is is a gas liquid transition I have from the critical point or melting or magnetic transition depends on magnetic field all have the same characteristics similarly in a second order phase transition is second derivative of free energy but most of the second order phase transition actually continuous transition like the critical point and super fluid transition except one there is one through the second order phase transition in the sense the second derivative shows that it is continuous and that is the most important termination is a superconductivity but however there are all these little qualifications here and there but in interest introduced a very powerful paradigm saying the order of a phase transition following order definition of order now Landau theory comes in beautifully Landau says okay I now know I know I can describe the free energy and I can describe the so this is the hysteresis and metastability then what shows in the presence of a magnetic field so h is the magnetic field and is the magnetization m I change that however be behold that I am switching the site but even after switching it does not reverse immediately it hang on and then go well in while again the other way around it is a long time so this hanging on on the old phase is called metastability and hysteresis and this is a trademark of first order phase transition second order phase transitions never so metastability or hysteresis this is very very important and this is what net Landau to develop beautiful theory so again come back why does the system so such has changed what is the origin of discontinuity then how can we calculate how can we calculate how can we evaluate the transition parameters like like an attendee what are the order parameters then why liquid sodium goes to BCC and while argon goes to FCC these are the questions one would like to answer this is where Landau now came in Landau these are the thing is stability analysis that when does one system become stable and one talks of convexity and concavity like for example I draw the line between the two minima then if the curve then it is convex however if it lies below then it is concave so from stability to metastability the stable phase to metastable you will have everywhere this convexity but however the other early you will have the concavity so these kind of things analysis done in terms of first and second derivatives as the energy is done here but that is very interesting but not the stability analysis and it will essentially go back the specific it has to be and I told you that specific it nothing but delta E square 0 is the average of a fluctuation and square of fluctuation fluctuation can be positive or negative but square has to be positive always the specific it has to be always always positive quantity and that is its stability condition so minus cpt must 0 that means cpt must be positive these are very this concave function and concave function that I describe here you can read it and this and we have done it little bit before but you can do it yourself but now I go to Landau theory and in 5 or 10 minutes that I have I will just describe Landau theory Landau theory is a beautiful theory based on the order parameter Landau theory is a free energy expansion in the order parameter Landau theory is the basis of almost all theories is a phenomenological theory but it is a beautiful theory and so is a mean it is sometimes called mean field theory because some kind of fluctuations are neglected but it so main merit of the Landau theory that it taught us to think in terms of order parameter talk of the minimize free energy and free energy landscape so this is the Landau free energy expansion so Landau said once it will find the order parameter Landau said okay now I know I can expand free energy so you went ahead and expand free energy in terms of this order parameter eta is the order parameter he said okay I am just a Taylor expansion I want to describe this is free energy of the new phase this is free energy old phase this is new this is old and he wrote down the Taylor expansion that all of us know the Taylor expansion right very simple Taylor expansion now we know Taylor expansion we know now Taylor expansion if I have to give alpha I will take DFD DFD eta at the old phase and I get alpha the way we do the a extrapolation interpolation of function but in my case that first derivative of order parameter free energy but free energy has to be minimum because it has to be stable that is we did all the stability analysis then what does it mean that means this quantity cannot be there alpha has to be zero because the free energy of the old phase must be minimum but how do I but that does not apply to this so I can now get the secondary AT I can get AT by taking this second derivative of free energy and then evaluate it in the old phase that is what we tell our expansion we take the derivative but evaluate it in the old phase OATB and all these quantities that temperature dependent and they are obtained in terms of the old phase free energy and now so this is now land of free energy by introducing this condition and eta is my order parameter which is used as a small next variable this is just beautiful now what do you land I do now okay this again I am writing this thing he then said okay let us make think of meta stability and let me think in terms of our hysteresis so if there has to be hysteresis then I must be that when I am hitting this there should be a minimum so it is getting stuck in the minimum and though I am this new phase is more stable old phase still remain a minimum so that explain meta stability what does that mean that means I have this kind of structure of free energy that means I have one deeper minimum one less deep minimum how do I get certain minimum I can get certain minimum by keeping the odd terms here however in critical so this is the first order phase transition where I need to have these odd terms I will not talk of these things I will just talk of this fourth up to fourth power however in a critical phenomena there is no meta stability there is no such no hysteresis so to minimum odd then how does second order phase transition the so important transition in a critical phenomena then magnetic transitions happens that then he is argued very nicely he said okay that happens in the following fashion he said in that case the one minima that becomes flat and it becomes increasingly flat and then it just becomes two phases same so if I go to this critical phenomena point temperature against density in gas liquid or binary mixture I am coming down like that then the minima in the gas phase there is a gas minima in the gas phase is becoming flatter remember second derivative of free energy is the compressibility that diverges it becomes infinite and that then then suddenly when you go below the critical point two minima appear that of the gas of the liquid look at the symmetry is called the symmetry breaking transition so how do I describe that now okay in the second order phase transition I go back to my Landau theory of this expansion I will come back this little bit later and then I say okay there is a the new phase I am going to describe as the symmetry that at plus eta and minus eta free energy is the same this is called parity then this is going to when I said that odd terms these appear I it remain only given term and in the even term there is a very important quantity now this is the free energy old term the a is the one that is the spring constant because this is the harmonic if I forget for a minimum of this thing this is the thing that gives rise to this two minima but before two minima my this is becoming flatter my getting flatter who describes that this quantity describes the flat that means this quantity which is the spring constant which holds the system together which is second derivative of free energy is becoming smaller and smaller how do I describe that and this the brilliance of Landau Landau said okay let us assume that happens linearly they are happy wounds that these a temperature dependent goes through zero at critical temperature approach and that goes so he assumed t minus pc and this is given by the time derivative of this temperature derivative of k now it changes sign in this quantity now changes sign at tc this becomes this is the second derivative of the order parameter but first there will be this temperature now because this quantity is compressibility so it that is why it is a second order position we are talking so this quantity now is made to change sign so as soon as they have changed sign this mine it become minus and become plus that gives rise to this so this is the Landau essentially then one goes on and doing okay this then one solve for eta we take the if I these are two minima then that satisfies the minimum condition that means derivative of df d eta has to be zero and then I do this this term this quantity this quantity and this a I put a equal to p minus cc and I take the derivative and I get this and eta equal to zero is the maximum which is this solution the trivial solution but then I get two values one is for this one and this one equal plus and minus however the beauty is that this order parameter these value the value from here to here where the minima scales in this funny way tc minus t to the power half this is the critical exponent or exponent of the a um called critical exponent or Landau exponent or mean field exponent that is something more needs to be done so this is Landau theory of critical phenomena then one can go on second order phase transition one can many many things are like that magnetic transition weekly first order phase transition then superconductivity isotopic nematics make it this weekly first order almost second order phase transition order disorder is a second order phase transition gas liquid at critical point use second order phase the huge number of things that happens in the second order phase transition so sorry I have to now go back and do little bit so this is the way second order phase first order phase transition is done like van der waals now we have we have we cannot ignore the cubic term we cannot ignore this term because that gives rise to metastability and one can again go back and do one thing van der waals gas we can do that so this is the van der waals equation the free energy starting from this equation I can integrate because free energy is dvp and put this then I can get the free energy and that is this quantity now I do what Landau told us to do I had one expansion in density density is the order parameter I told you gas liquid transition then I get this beautiful thing which is nothing but the real series and that now describes this phase transition and now and described the free energy that one can show that this is essentially very much is the ideal gas part this is the part that describes this free energy with one deeper than the other the asymmetry in the first order phase transition from land learning from land now how to do it go back to van der waals and we can describe that okay so I think this is we will stop here today this beautiful area of phase transition I have done it little bit before I did more now many things I forgot into say in the first time to give you students more physical insight but now I have done it here a little bit more so from now we will go on to doing few more things in phase transition in the next class one or two more class will be on phase transition then we go back again to do statistical mechanics of what the what we will do in phase transition essentially will be simple will be phenomenological landau theory because of the generality it is so general the things of phase transition that it is better to have a very general description that means we need not talk of intermolecular interactions like me at the time when you talk of intermolecular interactions we are demanding much more we are doing so much more work we need to then get the exactly the values of parameters like latent heat with the what are the order parameters then it is okay justified to do a very detailed calculation but then each calculation has to be for each phase transition I want to do a melting transition I have to do theory for melting well still landau theory in the background but I have to freezing that will be different from melting because the phenomena though they are thermodynamically or reverse of each other flat mag they are very different because liquid is going to crystal is different from crystal is going to liquid but if I want to do in terms of thermodynamics the general parameter then again landau theory comes in the mayors theory as is so such a detailed theory so the goal is different and our work is different our these things are extremely connected to each other and a scientist a physical chemistry physicist knows what is time and then develops the theory particular to the need of the time the need of the moment okay thank you we will see you in the next class