In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of two local events were held in South Dakota, in Lemmon and Fort Peer. Okay, thanks Ruth. I'm going to pass these out. I have a handout, if you already have it, don't worry about it, but I want to make sure everyone has that, because I'm going to refer to it a little bit in my presentation. Now I'm going to be talking about cover crops. You have to remember that cover crops are just going to be one component of that soil health system. Do we talk about crop rotation, diversity, no-till? We have cover crops in there as one component. Nutrient management and integrated pest management are the other two components of that five component cropping system. Design for soil health. Do we talk a little bit about the saline areas? Okay. I do have some soil test results from the saline area, right in that lantry area, right around Ridgeview, west of Eagle Butte. Zone 10 is going to be a very high saline area. It's going to be weighed on the surface. Look how much nitrogen is in the top two feet, 1342 pounds. I think that's enough to last for a while. I was kind of surprised with the phosphorus there, not quite as high as I thought. It's 37 parts per million. Down below down here, sodium, 5,400 parts per million of sodium. So yeah, there's a lot of different things in those saline areas. Sulfur maxed out on the scale 120 and 360. Okay, like I mentioned before, I'm going to just be talking about one small component of the soil health management system. And just to give you a quick definition of cover crops to make sure we're all on the same page, any crop that is planned between periods of regular crop production to prevent soil erosion, provide organic matter, provide nitrogen, the list goes on and on and on and on, and we'll cover more of those here in a little bit. But it's mainly looking at that, for you guys, it's going to be looking at that inter crop period where it's going to be wheat harvested and then prior to the corn planting time, for the most part, or oat peas taken off for hay and then prior to the following year's cash crop. If you're at all interested in cover crops, you need to go to this website, either order this book. It's like 25 bucks, or you can download it in a PDF format. It's very valuable and it discusses a lot of these species in great detail that I'm going to be talking about throughout this presentation. Another publication is Overview of Cover Crops and Green Miners. You can access that at this website there. Anywhere I give this presentation or something similar, we talk about rainfall. A lot of guys say I'm way too dry to plant cover crops. And we look at different periods throughout the year as far as your rainfall goes to determine that. And I was kind of shocked. I mean, again, growing up just south of Morristown, I was shocked to Lemons 30 year average from 1971 to 2000 is a little bit over 18 inches. That shocked me. I'm used to 15, 16, and if you look at Macintosh's 30 year period, it is exactly an inch 80 less than Lemmon, but 18.24 inches. So let's look at a couple of these intercrop periods where the cover crops may fit in and look at that rainfall period or amount of moisture that is received in that period. So when spring wheat would stop using an appreciable amount of water around August 1st, again I realize that date could shift anywhere from two weeks depending on the year, to when corn would start using an appreciable amount of water, 12.4 inches or 12.5 inches of precip. August 1st to July 1st for spring wheat to sunflower, a little bit over 15 and a half, winter wheat to corn, 13.8, 16.9 for winter wheat to sunflower. So what's that telling me is I think you do have a decent amount of moisture to be able to get a cover crop growing in that situation. Now, you got to remember when you look at these precip values, how much does the soil hold? How much can, in the top five feet, how much water can that soil hold? Plant available water. Usually no more than 11 inches and that lot is going to be dictated by soil textures. So your sands, you're going to hold a lot less of plant available water, it's going to be way less than that 11 inches, it's going to be around that 8, 7 or 8 inches compared to the heavier soils, you can approach that 11 inches. So what I'm saying is your cup is overfilled and you can spray a little bit of water to grow a cover crop. And the reason the central part of the state was gung-ho on cover crops was we were having a lot of trouble gaining corn planted in the wheat stubble. And this is actually on Cronin's farm, this is a field northwest of Gettysburg, it's on really heavy clay soils, it's actually soils, promise soils which would be similar to Stanley County that they have some ground up there. And the one on the right is where there was no cover crop planted after the previous year's wheat harvest compared to the one on the left. Now they ran out of seed right in this area and they actually had to quit planting this corn the spring of 2008 because it was just balling up the planter and they came back about 10 days later. Looking straight north in the exact same spot, through a lower area, very little corn stand there compared to where there was cover crop. So it allowed them the traffic ability to get across that field timely. Another concern is well, okay, it's using too much water. And it does, it will use an inch to an inch and a half of water in the fall. But by spring, when you're planting your next year's crop, what is it then? And this is just some study from North Dakota near Bismarck. This is on some fine sandy loam soils where they had cover crop plant available water was three inches, no cover crop, 3.11. So very little difference when it comes to planting corn, difference of what that cover crop used the fall before. So when we're selecting species, you need to know what your objectives are for that cover crop on that particular field. What do you want it to accomplish? We'll talk more about various objectives. What will the following year's cash crop be? Will it be corn? Will it be sunflower? That was going to dictate of what kind of mixtures you're going to want to be planting or what species you're going to want to be planting for that cover crop. Big one, herbicide applied to current year's cash crop. What did you put on that wheat crop that may carry over and damage that cover crop? That's another huge concern. So again, a big list of objectives. Provide nitrogen, add organic matter, improve, motivate, sustain soil biology is a huge one. As you learned earlier today, reduce soil erosion, reduce compaction. There's some species that are going to be better at deeper compaction compared to surface compaction. Manage nutrients, basically sequester nutrients. Bring up those ones that are down in the root zone, bring them up closer to surface. Provide weed control, that's a big one. Provide livestock grazing is a huge one. And reducing soil salinity. There's not a lot of species though to be able to plant and grow in those really white areas of the field. As I showed you earlier, you're going to basically be using that water to keep that white area from growing any larger. But in severe cases, you're better off with perennials in that situation. Just remember, two-thirds of the organic matter comes from the roots. So don't get discouraged if your cover crops four, five, six inches tall. You're still getting some benefit down below, not only from that sustaining that soil biology from moving forward, but also a little bit from some organic matter that's being put into the system. And increasing soil health should be the main focus for any cropland system. Soils have been mined for years under tilled systems. Restoring soil resilience is the key. And Dwayne hit a lot about that on that earlier. Why restore soil resilience? Increase soil organic matter. Again, going back to that biology, keeping that thing sustained and alive and moving. Improve water infiltration, decrease soil compaction, improve crop production or productivity. And Jeff Zimbrick will talk a little bit more on some of this water infiltration, some on some aggregates, stability, and so forth. I like showing these next three slides here. This is actually taken right south of Isabel, about 10, 12 miles, I believe. I took this on Labor Day of 2013. Cornfield, as you can see, or kind of a polar cornfield, but it was all burnt up. The history on this was, and the field I'll show you next. This one was CRP for 20-some years. It was taken out with tillage. It was farmed conventionally, with tillage. Wheat, it was like a wheat, sunflower, millet crop on there. Again, all done with tillage. New operator took it over in fall of 2012, late fall. In 2013, he planted corn out there, you can see in that very good cornfield. And very close by, another cornfield was taken out exact same time. However, it was strictly done with no-till. There was no disking or anything like that going on. Strictly low disturbance no-till, planted corn on both of these fields, and they're very close together. So you can't tell me that that CRP didn't provide some benefit as far as long-term no-till, water infiltration, and so forth of what's taken place there. So, like Dwayne said, carbon is huge. What we need to do to mitigate drought impacts growing up here, we're always five to seven days away from drought, always. Down here we're about 14 days away from drought, but here we're always very, very close. It's like we're always on the edge. So that carbon is huge in this area, especially, and we need to include, make sure we include obviously greater than 50 percent, Dwayne wants that 75 to 80 percent carbon into the system. It's a fine line there. It just depends on your pasture history on a given field of what's going to sustain you. But greater than two-thirds or greater would probably be ideal. Alternate sequences, corn behind wheat, corn behind soybean, corn behind field pea. And I know you guys could raise some really good field peas up here. I'd like to see some more of those growing up in here. Eliminate crop residue removal. If you got to take straw for the livestock, go to the neighbors. Whatever neighbor is in here, see if you can get his next year's corn stalks or wheat straw or whatever oat straw, and use that. That's something that's extremely critical. And if you're trained or hoping to, we have a number of guys that come in the office that always want to increase their main objective is to increase organic matter with these cover crops.  I'm sorry to tell you there's no amount of cover crop out there that's going to replace of what he removed with that wheat straw. No till with low disturbance openers. And cover crop, add cover crops where possible, but monitor the percent brassicas. You want to talk more about that in a little bit here. So on some of those sheets that I gave you, that was handed out. There's some characteristics there, but I try to summarize some of these in these next two tables of what species will do what as far as objectives. And really it's just kind of the government's recommendation. It's nothing science behind it, but there's some things that we can observe there of what's good for what, basically. Compaction here, a lot of guys see these big radish roots and they do do some good for some deep compaction. A lot of the surface compaction is better off with some finer root systems and that's where the rape is probably a better fit if you have more surface compaction. And then some of the very, very fine species out there like teff produces a lot of fine roots and they get into the real small areas that break up mainly plady soil structure. Moisture, I'm not going to worry about that, that's more for over east where we try to plant some species that are going to survive the winter and grow the falling spring to use more moisture yet over east. Nitrogen fixation, basically any of the legumes out there are going to fix some nitrogen. Some of them are warm season versus cool. You need to keep that in mind. There's a lot of these warm season ones, if you're going to be planting after spring wheat, you're just wasting your money. They're going to die at 34 degrees and not even get close to freezing at all. Residue cycling, brassicas do a good job of that and we'll talk more about that in a minute.  Salinity, these species here, the barley, sugar beet, rape, canola, all handle some salts fairly well. Rye should also be in there. So that handout I gave you there, that front page is just the characteristics of each of those species we have identified for NRCS purposes. You'll see a full seeding rate listed on there for each of the species. And that's just there for, if you wanted to design a system that's a, you only want 20% of a species, you just take 0.2 times that full seeding rate to get 20%. But the next two pages I put together last year and I debated whether or not to break it up into four different regions or five different regions across the state and I didn't. It was easier to do it this way but I wanted, I don't like to give you recipes and our old standard, our old way of doing it, we used to have premixes already built in there. Well, the mixture I would recommend up here for a guide would be completely different for the guide down in the southeast part of the state. But you could still use the similar guide, it's just going to have different, different percentages in there of each of those types. And I broke those species into different types. You got the cool season broadleaf legumes, the brassicas, cool season broadleafs that aren't the legumes, cool season grasses, etc. There's a percent range in there that I thought, personally I thought would be, would be ideal for meeting those objectives that you would want to select. Okay, the Wonder Cover Crop, more than likely doesn't exist. It'd be awesome if we could just plant one, it's going to grow, it's going to accomplish everything we want. But they just don't do well singly. So we're going to be looking at mixtures and cocktails and a number of you guys have probably been up to Bismarck. I've heard Jay and Gabe preach that over and over and we're seeing the same thing in South Dakota. Now, you need to look at your crop rotation. What are you missing as far as a crop type is going to help determine which species or which dominant species are going to be planted? You always want to be planting, the majority of your cover crop species need to be an opposite crop type of next year's cash crop. So if you're planting corn next year, you want to have the majority of the species in this year's cover crop be grasses. No, cool season broadleys and some cool season grasses should be in the majority of the mixture. You really don't want to put a lot of the warm season grasses in there. So again, cover crop to be planted should be an opposite type of cash crop to be planted the following year. So let's talk about some of these brassicas. You always hear the word brassicas. These are non-legumes and there's a number of them, brassicas and mustards. So let's go through these. Canola, if you do any canola whatsoever, make sure it's a winter type. Got a lot of problems with spring types, going to seed, producing viable seed and some of that viable seed is actually from Roundup Ready Canola. So make sure it's a winter type. I prefer to use rape. It's very, very similar to canola but it's actually better for grazing. Rape is better for grazing than compared to canola just because it produces more leafy material.  Turnips, another brassica. Most common one's going to be the purple top turnip. Going to produce that round bulb and I have a picture of that here in a minute but most of those are the round bulb. There are some turnip varieties like Barkant that is more of a radish type looking root system. The Barkant is going to be more forage, more valuable for forage. Radish, two main types of seed to forage. I have a picture on that in a minute. Crabby, kale, swede, and then mustard. And then we haven't dealt a lot with some mustards. One year we did some mighty mustard at Dakota Lakes and then here on, and that stuff just came bombing out of the ground and looked really good. It produced a lot of biomass. It all went to seed but I don't think it was viable seed, right?  No, I think you, yeah, I don't think you sprayed much but you did do some. Kale is going to be probably the cold hardiest of them all. It's going to tolerate temperatures down in the single digits for several nates in a row. Swede is one we really don't deal with unless it's going to be a full season cover crop. Something you're going to plant in the spring. It takes, usually you don't want to start grazing it for about 180 days so it's one of those longer season ones. They're known for their rapid fall growth, great biomass production. It produced a lot of biomass but most of it's 85 to 90 percent water. Protein content on a number of these brassicas are anywhere from 12 to 19 percent, depending on if you're looking at the roots versus the top growth. So pretty decent protein content. They're excellent nutrient scavengers.  Pest management characteristics. Most species release chemical compounds that may be toxic to soil-borne pathogens and pests such as nematodes, fungi and some weeds. Mustards usually have a higher concentration of these chemicals. Here's 30 days after growth. Left-hand side's turnips. These middle two are radishes here. Then winter canola and then sugar beet. That's 30 days after planting. 60 days after planting. Here's your purple top turnip. Here's your radish. Dwarf S6 Rape or winter canola I guess is listed there and then your sugar beet. So you see the different root architecture. And again going back to deep compaction versus surface compaction. This one's probably better at surface compaction than this one is probably a little bit better at deeper compaction. Just to illustrate what it can do. What brassicas can do for nutrient scavenging. A test in western Sully County, west of Oneida. The cover crop was planted August 18th. We split the field, did soil test on it right after planting where the cover crop was at 88 versus 90 and the top two feet. You would expect them to be the same. You would hope that they'd be the same and they were. You compare that in late October when we went back out there to soil sample them. 112 pounds where there was no cover crop compared to 18 pounds where there was a cover crop left over. So that nitrogen is in that cover crop biomass being protected. Not able to leech down but it's going to release throughout next year's growing season. And that's one of the questions that a lot of the researchers are working on for a unique given area. Because the soil moisture and temperature dependent on how much of that nitrogen is going to be released to next year's cash crop. We just can't come up with one number. It's going to be a range. If you're warm and wet, it's going to be a high percentage of that. It's going to be released. If you're cold and dry, it's going to be a very low amount. Looking at manure, they fit very well in a manure application time setting or period. These soil tests were taking in March 9th of 2008 where there was cover crop. There was 49 pounds left over in the top four feet compared to 233 pounds in the top four feet where there was no cover crop. What does that tell you? They were over applying to manure. Maybe? A little bit. Just a slide on fertilizing cover crops. A lot of guys were trying to minimize the input cost on a lot of these species. And the last thing you want to do is throw more money yet when you're growing them. However, if you're planting on or hoping to graze them, you get that time to rain right after planting. You got an excellent stand. You're going behind wheat. You had an excellent wheat yield. Your protein was less than 12 or lower for low on the low side. You know you're short of nitrogen. You're probably going to want to throw a little bit of the urea or 28% out there to get some growth out there for biomass. You need to be considering that as fertilizer for next year's corn crop or whatever crop you're going to. The more you want out of your cover crop, the more it makes sense to nurture the cover crop. Just some examples on what cover crops can do for weed control. This was actually on Duane's north unit. No cover crop on the left the previous year. This is in the spring and the one on the right. You see hardly any weeds growing out there whatsoever. No, it was planted. It was just planted. You said you had the hard slot to speak in. Try the one right after lunch. Just another example of weed control where the guy was planted a few cover crops over here along the tree belt for hunting purposes. Went across the field to empty out the drill and the rest of this didn't have it. You see a huge difference there for weed control. Now a lot of guys get intimidated. We got guys over the east that do a lot of it just on prevent plant acres.  So they don't listen to us.  But if you happen to leave that, it just melts down. Especially if there's a lot of brassicas in there. It melts down to absolutely nothing. There's just nothing left. Like I said, it's 85 to 90 percent water.  And it really doesn't... There's no interference there whatsoever. A lot of guys were worried about their residue managers plugging up with these big radish roots or turnip roots. There's no way she's going to cross that. And we talked about those. Residue decomposes very quickly, very low carbon and nitrogen ratio. And like I said before, a lot of these tolerate cold temperatures. A lot of them will handle in that mid to upper teens for several nights in a row, if not weeks in a row, and be just fine and keep growing. Here's an example of oil seed rash compared to forage radish. Forage radish, obviously after the name, better for livestock grazing, more leaf material produced. And then I said there were hybrids. Hybrids of turnip and rape called Paja. Hybrid of turnip and winter canola called T-Raptor and Hunter. Hybrid of turnip and kale called Winfred. And this is going to be... Since there's kale in there, it's going to be extremely winter or tolerant of cold temperatures. And if you're doing some late season grazing, I would definitely include some of that in there. Now with these hybrids, they're a little bit higher in seed costs. Seed size is just a little bit bigger, but for the most part, we still use the same seeding rate. And maybe we need to change on those. But work with your seed supplier on some of those as far as some of these hybrids, and they can give you a pretty good figure in there to include in that mixture. Now, remember that one side, I said monitor your percent brassica. Why is that? At Dakota Lakes in 2008, this is a picture taken in July. This is on the rotation on dry land. Winter wheat, corn, field pea rotation. There was no cover crop put in there. There's actually corn growing out there right now in 2008, but the previous year, after winter wheat, there was no cover crop planted. The Wayne planted several different treatments out there. Some of them included 100% brassica, and it would have been after two years of wheat. So this would have been... The cover crop would have been placed right here. Two years of wheat, look at the bare ground, July. Central South Dakota, you don't want that. 25 to 30 bushel yield hit. 100% brassica is not a good plan. So again, as you move further west, you're going to want to take this sheet I gave you and monitor that percent brassica. You don't want to go over. I don't think there's enium over there. Maybe for the wildlife one, there might be one that's 50%. For all the rest are at 40%. It's zero to 40%. So for out here, you're going to want to be in that 25 to 30% at most for percent brassicas. Brassicas like sulfur. So if you're following corn behind that or even spring wheat behind a certain crop where you had cover crops in, I've seen sulfur deficiency in both of those crops. You're going to want some sulfur out there. I don't care what your soil test says. Just like Anthony, I don't rely on sulfur soil tests at all. I think personally, I think it's more of a sampling error than it is a testing error, but maybe I'm wrong there. You're going to want some sulfur out there. Depending on how you put it on, if it's surface supplied, you're going to want about 25 pounds, 20 to 25. If it's banded, you can get by with that 8 to 10, maybe 12 pound range. Okay, the switch gears, the cool season broadleafs, non-legumes, sugar beet flax, camelina, sugar beet tolerant to salinity, residue decomposes quickly, good taproot. The problem is germination is very, very poor. At least we get the rejects from the seed companies. And I have yet to be able to find a seed that you get a real good establishment off of sugar beet. So I have quit recommending them, but it's still one out there that if you happen to get a good seed supplier and the quality is good, the germ is good, I'd throw some in, especially if you're looking at trying to address some salinity. And cows just love these. They love them. Pardon? Sheep do too? Okay. Flax, small seed produced taproot, does not tolerate polluted grain soils or those high insoluble salts, fairly tolerant to frost once, once established. And it's one, flax is very mycorrhizal. I started including a little bit of flax in every mixture. Winter camelina, we did a little bit of work with this over in the Watertown area. Like its name says, it's winter. We're hoping that to survive the winter, take off early in the spring. It's a broadleaf. We're trying to look at that opposite cover crop going to corn. And we had limited success. We had some come back, but it was just, I don't know, it just, maybe we need to revisit that again, but we tried to work with some guys on it and it didn't do overly well. It should, but it didn't. Of course, these are broadleaf legumes. We got a whole host of them. L-F-L-F-Sweet clover could be probably in that warm season one, but we got red clover, white clover, L-Site clover, hairy vetch, common vetch, notice two vetches. Very, very different. Very important to know the difference. Hairy vetch versus common vetch. Crimson clover, chickling vetch, third vetch. Field pea and lentils. Clovers, I'm not going to talk a lot about these. These are more, more over East. The sweet clover might have some fit here. Well, anything I don't like about sweet clover, 50% or more hard seed. A gift that keeps on giving. Hairy vetch. A little bit of hard seed in there, but the seed size is very similar to wheat, so it's hard to get separated out. It's one, a little, not quite as bad a sweet clover, it's one of those that will keep, seem like you plant it once and you have it for the next 15 years. So I'm very hesitant. I only recommend this, the guys that I really, really know well that they'll do a good job in controlling that volunteer because it will overwinter. This one will overwinter. Almost all the other ones I covered here for the most part will not overwinter. The frost will kill them out for the most part.  And if you're going to corn, you need to be mixing a sulfonylurean with your burned down. Do not do a roundup, bandville roundup 2,4-D. It will not work. It may look like it will work for 14 days, but it will not work. Make sure you throw a little bit of Express or Harmony ESG in there to take care of that. But Harry Vetch will overwinter. Just a picture of that. Crimson clover again, more for over east. Picture of that. Chickpea vetch. I like this one a lot. Produces a lot of nitrogen. It's actually one of that the organic farmers grow a lot of. It fixes a lot of nitrogen very quickly. It's drought tolerant. Only problem, seed cost is high. 75 cents a pound. So if I know a guy's not going to grade because some of these can be toxic to cattle and sheep. And it's mainly if it produces seed. It's not the vegetated portion that is toxic. It's mainly the seed. But in some cases, if you happen to get it planted early, it doesn't take long for them to flower and maybe produce a little bit of seed. So you got to be watching there. So if the guys don't graze, graze it. I'll recommend a little bit in the mixture. But I'll dilute it out with some other cheaper legume species like common vetch, like lentils, those sorts of things. And there's a picture of chickling vetch, also known as grass pea. I don't have a picture in here of of, and chickling vetch tolerates or handles the competition from these big leaf brassicas very well. So it does a really good job in there. That's just a picture of the mixture there. There's lentil in there, radish, dorsal 6-rape, and chickling vetch. I don't have a picture of the fuel pea, but I like fuel peas a lot. But somewhat similar to chickling vetch, the seed can get kind of expensive because our full seeding rate for fuel peas, I believe, look on the sheet. I think it says 70 pounds. So even if you're doing 20, 30% of that, the seed cost gets up in a hurry. A lot of these I'll do a small portion of the species I really like, depending on what cost is. And then I'll dilute it out with some cheaper ones, but they're in the same family. They're still a cool season legume. Lentils, a lot of lentils out there. Indian heads, red berries, rose-town mortons are some of the common ones. Smaller seed results in cheaper costs. They're a little bit slower growing and not as aggressive. Most of these legumes, a lot of them, you won't really see very robust early on, depending on how much free nitrogen you have left remaining in the soil. Usually we don't see these coming on until mid-September or so before they really start taking off. Just a picture of Indian head lentils in Gettysburg. Warm season broadleafs, legumes. Warm season broadleaf, cow peas, soybeans. Non-legumes, sunflowers, and buckwheat. Safflower should be listed there also, although safflower is kind of on the edge of cool and warm. Buckwheat, short-season crop. Residue decomposes quickly. Excuse me, not as drought-tolerant. Scavages, nutrients, phosphorus that are unavailable to other crops. Kind of what Mike was alluding to earlier this morning. It actually releases a slight mild acidic exudate from its root system, and anytime you throw an acid in the soil, it's actually going to release some phosphorus there. So that's kind of where that gets that from. Cow peas, warm season broadleaf. Not frost-tolerant whatsoever, but it likes it hot and dry.  If you don't get them planted up here by July 15th, I would be very hesitant in throwing cow peas in there. Cool season grasses. I won't spend a lot of time on these since we grow a lot of them up here. We know a lot about rye, barley, very salt-tolerant and like that from that standpoint. I do do some with some barley. And oats is probably the biggest one that I add to every mixture. I always put 20% oats in, about 14 to 20 pounds, depending if you're going to be grazing or not. Fairly mycorrhizal. Does corn loves oats? You plant corn in the oats stubble? Does very well. Triticale, a cross between rye and durum wheat, spring and winter types. We got some guys messing with that, that sort of stuff. Anywhere grass, I don't think for the most part you're going to do a lot of that. Just watch where you get your seed source if you do try some of it. It's just not one of those cool season grasses that I love the root system. It's somewhat similar to teff. Teff grass has a very fine root system, but this is a very spindly plant in a cover crop mixture. And most of the guys are using this over east and into Iowa. The other cover crop, if you want to start growing some seed, rye, cereal rye. And we've used to raise some cereal rye when I was growing up up here. I will take all your cereal rye you want. I guarantee you that. They use a lot of cereal rye down there. Warm season grasses, green and forest sorghum, millet, sedan grass, sorghum, hybrids, corn, teff grass. We do a lot of these up here. I'm not going to spend a lot of time. Teff grass is one that you probably haven't heard a lot of. Warm season and annual grass, very, very small seeds generally. And it comes coated or uncoated to help with the seeding process, but anywhere from three to eight pounds, depending on the thickness of the coat. Again, a good root system, as far as being very fine, getting into the small areas to help develop soil structure. And it's very good hay quality. Very, very good hay quality. And there's a number of guys in the peer area. Some guys raised it for seeds. Some guys have raised it just strictly for hay, get two or three cuttings off of it, and have done quite well with it. Now, magic date, at least where I'm at, I want cover crops planted by August 5th. Produces the most growth consistently. This window, we've studied this for three years. That window was two weeks, either side of that, all the time. Some years, this year probably would have been the year you could have got by with August 20th, 25th, and been just fine. We just don't know the secret is, is what October is going to be. If I knew what October was going to be every year, I sure wouldn't be working for the government. But for the most part, the earlier, the better to get those established. There's just a picture in McPherson County over there by Leola. Turnip, Ratch, German Millet, volunteer oats, 6,500 pounds of dry weight. Now, a lot of guys want to bale these up. So I'll have them and bale them up, compared to just grazing them. North Dakota study, where they looked at grazing them the following year, grazing them that fall versus chopping them off, looking at the following year's cash crop impact on yield. Grazing 91 bushel corn, where they chopped and removed the residue, 68 bushel corn. Removing that armor is extremely valuable. Now, this is just a quick study that I did on some corn stocks. I sampled the field November 1st, and it was grazed. This one field was grazed right next to it, about less than the eighth mile away. Both of these fields have been managed by the same guy for the past 15 years. And the soil tests were taken, unfortunately, after grazing. I wish they would have had some soil tests before the grazing period, but the producer was shocked, looked at zone two here. 24 parts per million Olsen here, compared to the ungrazed 11. Again, both of these, both of these were managed the same way for the past 15 years. That was year one after grazing. Year two after grazing, I thought, oh, that's a fluke, never going to happen again. Same thing. Again, they weren't grazed. It was sunflowers this year. The other field was grazed this current year, 18 compared to nine, still holding steady. It wasn't a fluke. And it actually held on for, I have slides for, I forgot to add them in this one, but I do have slides for year three, and they were still there. They're getting closer together, but it's still higher for where it was grazed. The challenge is trying to figure out how to mix these together to seed them. Most guys with the air seeders lie easier. If you do happen to do maybe some larger seeded field peas, or that chickling vetch seed, do you have some of that here? Okay. The chickling vetch seed looks like peat rock, and it's bigger. So you probably need to keep that separate and put it in a different tank. And with air carts, easy to do with a 750 drill, a lot more difficult. If that's all you have with a 750 drill, I'd still throw them all together. Put it in there, only feel about halfway full, because by the time you get it empty, it's going to be started to get separated. But most guys just throw them in together. And this has been by far our best way to establish cover crops.  And we did this six weeks before harvest, and it was way too early. Way too early. We got cover crops to come, and that wheat was still too green, got shaded out, and they died too early. If you're on broadcasting and standing wheat, I would not do it any more than maybe three weeks beforehand, preferably two. But the drilling method has been the best. The main issue with the drilling that I see in my part of the area, with the biomass that we have over there, guys set the drill too shallow. Most of the time I tell guys, depending on how worn their disc are, is one notch less than wheat, possibly two notches less than wheat. I want you to cut through that residue. I've seen too many fields where the guy started bright and early in the morning, a shitty stand, nice stand starting about one, two o'clock in the afternoon. You can tell right where he's at.  Just because they were not cutting through this thick matter residue. I know these seeds are small, but you need to get them in the seed to soil contact. I'm not going to cover that, but we do have some termination guidelines, and it does affect this area if you do summerfellow, and you try to put a cover crop on summerfellow. It does affect this area, because as of right now, RMA Insurance says that that cover crop needs to be terminated 90 days before planting that next crop. So the guys with fallow with winter wheat definitely can impact you. The guys with fallow going to spring wheat, eh, you may be able to get by with that. But check with NRCS, we have this part of it. It's attached to our practice standard. If you're not familiar with it, let one of your offices know and they can get that for you. But in summary, the benefits of cover crops are true over several years. You'll see improvements in crop yield, pest management, and soil tilt, if you commit to cover crop use whenever and wherever possible in rotation. And that's all I have. So with that, do I have any questions? Sorry, it's right after lunch. I know it's just as hard for me as it is for you guys. Great. I got off easy.