This right here is an LED dot matrix. It has 64 LEDs, 8 rows, 8 columns. And when you light up different ones you can start to draw an image, text, or any basic information. So in this video I will show you how this thing works, how to write the code for it, how to wire it up, everything you need to get started. If you enjoy this type of content give the video a like and subscribe to the channel to see more reviews and tutorials on different electronics such as these. Also let me know in the comments what you want to see next. LED matrixes tend to come in three different types or models. First dimension ones where it's just one rows of LEDs so things that are usually used to kind of show audio or zero to a hundred percent where they light up progressively. Then you have two dimension ones like this one where it's two rows that make a 2d plane and you can draw 2d things like the smiley face here. And then you have three dimensional ones like this one but stacked on top of more versions of itself until you make a cube. So LED matrixes are really just a bunch of single LEDs connected in a format. For ones like mine right here it's a grid of rows and columns across and up and down. When you want to light up a single LED in a single location like let's say we want to write up the top right corner this one right here where my finger is. We have to give power to this row right here and then to this column right here and that will light up that single LED. Now because of that we can only light one LED at a time. But what you couldn't tell when I was doing that little animation earlier in the video is that all those LEDs were actually firing off on their own and only one at a time. Because it happens so quick at such a high speed our eyes can't pick it up even cameras will struggle to pick it up so that means we can light up a whole board while actually only lighting up one LED at a time. It's actually really similar to how keyboards work like this one right here. When I press for example the H here it goes through this row and then that column. When it comes to use cases these things aren't really used in any professional setting they're just not really efficient you can't put a lot of the screen you're kind of limited to these weird you know 8-bit type animations. You have other matrix type devices like this one right here which you might have seen on old school microwaves but even then that's not enough you need more stuff to display on the screen you also have this which is also just one then we also have the LCD display we did in the last video. So when it comes to professional use cases these are not that great but what's cool about these is a lot of them like mine right here come with two ends and you can actually take multiple and stack them together and make this big billboard style animations which people use for some projects. When it comes to actual specific matrices there's usually two different types there's one like mine which comes with four or five pins and then inside you can't really see it but between the board let me see if I can focus it up between the board right there not where those connectors are but in the middle there it's very hard to see I'll put an arrow up on the screen but right inside of there there's actually a chip for controlling this because if you had one of these raw like this one right here you would have to connect to each pin individually like they do right here so you can see there's eight pins up here and eight pins down there that's the rows that's the columns but because of that chip in here it allows me to control this board with a lot less code with a lot less wiring because I don't want to do 16 wires I want to do just five so if you don't have one like mine where there's a chip inside and it's just the raw matrix board I have a second set of code in the description for you to open up and go do but wiring up is the same thing you're just gonna have to wire up the rows and the columns instead of wiring up a control pin a power pin a ground pin etc if you have one like mine then you can continue with the code I'm going to show you right now so when it comes to wiring up it's really simple we've got five cables the first two we're going to do is power and ground so power is going to go to vcc then we have ground which is going to go to gnd then we have din oh I have some stuff running on this I'm just going to unplug it then we have din which is going to go to 12 on the board then we have clk which is going to plug into 11 and then we have cs which is going to plug into 10 the first step as always is to include any libraries you're using so in ours we're going to be using two different libraries led control and binary dot h you shouldn't have to install binary but you should have to install led control so just go over to your library manager put that in and then install the one by eberhard then the next step is to go and declare your led control your matrix and in our case here are all the cables we're plugging into 12 11 10 and then one you're not playing into but that's usually the reset pin then we're going to declare a variable called delay time this is going to be how long we want to wait between animations the reason we're putting it up here is so that we could change it once instead of having to change it four or five times down in our loop I'll make sure to have this part down in the description it's just our pre-made faces the way this works is each one of these is a row and then wherever there's a zero it means off wherever there's a one that means on so in the top row there's eight leds the first two will be off the middle four will be on and then the last two will be off making eight and then repeat that for every single shape so if you wanted to make a letter which I think we should do at the end is we'll go and actually copy paste one of these and make our own in the setup it's pretty simple we have to do a little shutdown here to start the code we have to set our brightness we're going to set it to an eight this is a comma right here this is in the point so it's zero and then eight and then we have to clear display which means if there was any previous led setup on it we want to restart it and then do this one when it comes to setting an led on or off you have three different options you can either set an led one specific one manually so you would do you don't really need the address but you need the row the column in the state the state being zero or one zero for off one for on if you want to do the whole row or column at once you could do what we did earlier here which is doing this little bit here which as I went over zero zero means off off and then four ones means four leds will be on in the middle and the last two will be off again because of the zero zero so if you wanted to do something like that you could do that right here in set row and take care of the whole row at once instead of going one by one with set led now let me show you an example this right here is our sad face and it's using the sf array which is up here so you can see we have sad face and then we have all these we just take each one of these and we put them see if I could do this manually like that and because we're doing this that means the whole row will be taken care of with this one command and then this is the next row there's an extra row and we do that eight times to take care of the whole screen now by default they should be off so if you want to set any on you have to do this but if you're not going to touch a row you don't have to actually input anything let's put that back to what it was and let's upload this and see if it works look at that so we have our sad face as I went over before it's off off four ons and then off off that's because of what we did up here they actually all have that which I guess you would call like the forehead or the top of the head part and then you can see the next row it does off on middle off and then on off I think it'd be cool that we can actually make our own face or whatever you want to call it I think something that would be simple is the letter H so I'm just going to do that so first thing I'm going to do is comment out sad face and refresh and have it clear the display because this thing is really bright comment this out because it's breaking the code oh I commented out the whole loop there we go that should work so we'll do an array called letter H it's a byte array with eight pieces inside of it and then I'm going to go and we're going to need to shut off a bunch of rows so let's do one two three four five six seven eight all right and then one thing I should say one thing I should note is for the letter H should probably be easier for us to work in columns because we have those two big parts of the H and then the one in the middle so we can work with columns for the two sides and then the middle one can be a row so we're only actually going to need three pieces for the letter H which will make our lives very easy so I'm going to uncomment those so let's do the first the columns so we want column zero and column seven or also known as the first column and the last column so zero and then seven we want those to be lit up so what we'll do is we'll grab the pieces of our array the first two will be full on so we need one two three four five six seven eight we need that twice the rest of these don't matter because we're only going to use three of them so I mean you could if you want to you could shorten it like this and then you could do that so the first column zero zero is going to be turned on the second or the sorry the last column the seventh column is going to be on as well that's going to be the first part the second part we don't even need these to be honest just because they're all three the same we could just copy paste that but it doesn't matter and then we're going to do one two three four five let's do the fifth row the fifth row to be on all right let's upload that and see what we get something broke what broke well apparently it's not set cool it's set column so let's try that and see what happens boom there's our h also I made this one a little little mistake here that should look more like an h right there check that out we made our own letter that's it for that led matrix if there's anything you want to know about it see about it any of the code you have questions you want to make other letters you can do two things you can like the video subscribe to the channel and then check out the discord link in the bio of this video where you can come and join and ask me questions personally or anyone else who's in that group thanks for watching


Okay, and we are live again on OE Week Live. This is the show that I just made up myself. I'm Alan Levine from OE Global. And this is really meant to just bring a little bit of our radio show type field to Open Education Week. There's so many sessions going on. And I thought it'd be kind of interesting to have more of an informal time to talk about what's going on and bring in some people to talk about their work or things they're doing this week or just random questions that kind of come up as we do in conversation. So initially I had this idea I was gonna like announce and say like, look up in two hours there's this event and three hours this is event. But I trust that people know how to use the calendar but we do have them organized by day. And just one thing that I hope we did right is that people like they see the times and dates in their local time. And so working with kind of global projects anybody here listening knows you're always kind of wrestling with time zone conversions. And so we try to nick that one in the bud. But with that I'm gonna bring a couple people on stage and we'll get to meet them and talk about them and just see what they are doing in terms of their week or beyond and what they're interested in. And now I'm going to start adding some folks to the stream. And so really glad to have a group that like volunteered to be part of my crazy idea. So I'm just, you know obviously we wanna get to know each other. So I will just say, you know, tell us, you know where you are, what you do and maybe like one highlight that may have happened already for you during Open Education Week. So I'll ask Laura to come first because Laura was great, she came in early and we had some great chats and we talked about like South Dakota and motorcycles and he never know what comes up in conversation. So welcome, Laurie. Thank you, thank you. My name is Laurie Asup. I'm Open Education Operations Manager with BC Campus and I'm centered in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. And actually I didn't work yesterday so this is the highlight of Open Ed Week for me thus far but looking forward to lots more reading and attending sessions and talking with people. That's great. And we're gonna come back to you to talk about the 10 year anniversary for the open textbooks at BC Campus. And so next up I'm gonna bring up, I'm gonna, I hate the mango name, but Minas Vizgerda and it was great because I loved it because you like applied and I don't know you. And so I think it's really good when people discover this. But I certainly know a lot about University of Edinburgh so I always wanna hear about that. So let's know where you are and what you're up to. So hi folks. So I'm Vid, I usually go by his nickname but it's just the first letters of my name. I'm a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh and sending everyone best wishes from the city where today we had snow and sun at the same time. Fantastic. That can be a crazy place. Yeah. Well, if you want so I'm in Saskatchewan and it's about minus 20 out there with the wind. So, but definitely excited to hear about your work and interest there. Are you part of GOGN by chance or? I am and that's where I heard about this show from. Fantastic. We love them. And so thanks and we wanna come back to you and hear about the topic that you submitted. But now I'm gonna bring on my good friend, Nate and he works for a little organization you might not have heard of. You're muted, buddy. I hate to do that. Like... Yeah, I didn't even realize that I had muted myself there for a second. Okay, sorry about that. Yeah. Thanks, Alan. Yeah, so I'm Nate Anchol. I'm calling to you from the Nichowana traditional lands of also known as Portland, Oregon in the United States where the weather is a lot like Edinburgh actually often, but today we have sun. So it's rare. It could be raining also a little bit later. Who knows? I work for Creative Commons. I lead communications and community over there. And just really happy to be here and also happy to be with people from two of my favorite institutions, BC campus. Love them and University of Edinburgh, which I would love to visit someday. And of course, we global. Well, it gets to love for BC campus, right? Yeah. Okay. Let's just, I'll start with you, Nate, because you're already on the screen. Okay. I know Creative Commons obviously has a lot going on during Open Education Week. Can you give us the rundown or some highlights? Yeah, I mean, part of it is that since Creative Commons has kind of a global community of people all over the world, that's a global community, doing all kinds of things, especially in open education and with open educational resources and other kinds of open materials, there's a lot going on. And so maybe the best way to highlight it here is, can I share a link? Yes. If you put it in the private chat, I'll get it on screen. Okay. And so that's the blog post we just issued to kick off this week that kind of highlights all the things that we're trying to emphasize during Open Education Week this year. And I admit that my colleagues, Jenrin Wetzler and Cable Green are the ones who are mostly focused on that work. And so I'm just kind of, the message you're bringing you information about it. Anyway, it's like, you know, highlighting a lot of the work that's actually happened throughout the year and surfacing it again in Open Education Week so people can get a handle on it. I'll say for me personally, my highlight was, I don't know if you'll be able to see this, but I dug out of my closet an old shirt that I have. Is that some kind of wine or something? Yeah, it's like, it's the kind of wine, no. In all my work, previously in Open Technology, I used to work on the Sky Project. And at one point we got these fancy bowling shirts that said Sakai on the back. Sakai's, you know, not as widely used now as it was then, perhaps. But at any rate, I was very happy to find this shirt because it reminded me of my roots. And just for, I was thinking about this because the conversation sparked up on Twitter recently about, you know, what Open really consists of.  What does Open really mean, right? But I was just thinking in terms of the kinds of things that I've been heavily involved with, it's at least always meant open tools and technologies. And so working to help educational institutions kind of build and use open tools and technologies. It's been around open content. So Open Educational Resources is an example of that or open access and open scholarly publishing to other areas that are highly, you know, at work and education. And then third, but not least, is just Open Educational Practices, I would say. And, you know, the idea of sort of bringing in other ways of doing things that are maybe outside the standard practices that we at least see here in the United States a lot in traditional education. And to that effect, if I was gonna talk more, but I'd like to shut up for a while and hear from some of our other guests, I would bring up this project that we did a while back called Open Educational Experience Bingo, which is about trying to explore maybe all of those three facets of openness. That's good. We're gonna bring up the bingo card. So definitely would do that. And there was a little bit of discussion this morning that came, I think via Twitter, just about like, what do we mean when we talk about an open education movement or a community because it has lots of bounds and or not. And so that's sort of in the similar vein. I don't think we can maybe never stop talking about what it means or it includes and it should be evolving. Yeah, we just, we also need to do things. We can't just keep talking about it. Let's get to haze everyone a while and reflect, right? Yeah, I think so. All right, so great, Nate. And we'll come back to the bingo and maybe talk about, I know we- If we have time. Yo, yeah, we have time. I'm in charge here, man. I can make it happen. With that, I'm gonna ask Laurie to come back on and tell us a little bit about the stuff that she's doing on the BC campus. Well, last year, but we're still wrapping up on this. It was the 10 year anniversary, not only of the original BC Open Textbook project but the collection itself. And I was mentioning to Alan before the show started, the problem with success is you gotta make sure you get everything done. And so right now, we are working, doing the production and trying to get all of the wonderful open textbooks and open course packs and all the ancillaries that go with those into the open collection. So I'll put a link here in the chat so you can see. This is the BC Open Collection 2.0. Originally it was called the BC Open Textbook Collection or library and now we just call it the BC Open Collection because we're expanding beyond the textbooks. So anyway, like I said, we're doing production, getting the open courses, getting the open textbooks into the collection. And what's unique about this collection, even though we have people from across Canada and in the US and around the globe using all of those OER, we do target the post-secondary instructors and courses in British Columbia. And so what I like about this new collection is we are doing just that. We will identify specific courses that an open course can be used in and the textbook that would go along with it. And we have a very good articulation system set up in British Columbia. So if within this collection now, if you plug in the course code for a book or a course that resource is built for, all the comparable courses at other institutions in the province, all the transferable courses appear on that same page. So that I find really exciting because I remember early on in this work that was one of the complaints was, well, how do I find OER for my course? How do I know it's gonna work? Will it fit the learning objectives, et cetera? So we're trying to make that a little more easy. So trying to address the practical end of open ed, especially for our province. And I wanna compliment you. When I saw the collection came out, it was like, it was a major leap from the, I mean, the open textbook collection was great, but in that vein, you had to find the textbook first, then find some of the answers or the materials and the way the collection site is designed, it's a little more fluid and it's more flexible to find things of use. Yeah, it was two years in development. So there was a lot of user testing done, a lot of discussion, lessons learned and it continues to be refined. So there are features that we will continue to add to it, for example, more easily tracking the adoption and usage of what's in the collection or outside the collection as well. So that's something that I'm in charge of is counting all those books and usage across the province. So we're very proud that we've, well, we count this cumulatively, but we just surpassed the $34 million savings mark for students in British Columbia. That's an impact and I'm curious about that. I forget where there was some discussion about like the ways an author or the publisher of an open textbook can find out where it's being used or adopted. Usually it's through some kind of contact form and you let them know that, hey, I've used your textbook, but you probably don't, that's an underestimate of the reuse. I always figure maybe we're counting half, but I implemented a program a few years ago and I call it the ongoing adoption program. And so I worked with my key contacts at the different BC institutions and asked if they would consider they would take over the tracking of everyone in their institution rather than BC campus relying on individual faculty members coming to us and filling out our form. And that's been, I think really eye-opening for the institutions and very, very helpful. So it requires that they stand back and review the landscape and see what their faculty are up to. It sparks conversations and it has led to other beneficial results of practicing open ed on campus and they're very proud of what's happening. So it's made our, my job easier, but also it is enhanced awareness on campus. Right. Well, lovely. And I'd like to come back more and hear about some more of this work. I'm gonna give a bit of chance to talk a little bit about your PhD research or your interest. And I was curious about the item you submitted through the form in terms of what you're trying to collect. Sure thing. It's kind of funny how introductions here, I guess go, what's your name and what does open mean to you? Well, actually, I have to tell you, I was thinking about, because sometimes I like to be clever with my questions and I actually did the trendy thing and I asked chat GPT for some sample questions for an international audience and they were terrible. And so, but yes, we can talk about pets or favorite hobbies and actually I like to come back to that because we do like to get to know each other. So, pardon my parenthetical there. Oh, that is a beautiful use for chat GPT. It's got so many uses. Loads of interesting discussion starters at our university as well. But anyway, so I'm coming on as a PhD student, but actually my research is a little bit less related to this, but a project I'm currently working on on the side is all about open education. For a little bit of context, at our university, we use Blackboard Learn as the main learning management system and universities being forced to switch from Learn Original to Learn Ultra. Nate turns away, no more Blackboard Learning. I tried to get it in action, Nate. Yeah, so as part of the switch to Learn Ultra because Learn Original is being deprecated, all of the courses are moving gradually towards the new Learn Ultra as well. One of the things that is changing besides better mobile support and accessibility features is the removing guest access. And that means any courses that are on Blackboard Learn Ultra, you cannot access them without being locked in.  So how do we do it? And I'm running a project experimenting with the kinds of approaches we could do, looking into how do other institutions, worldwide, publish resources openly, and what can we copy? I think Blackboard just got his camera. It looks like my camera is a bit temperamental. That's okay, that's okay. I was just worried we lost you. Yeah, now I'm still here. Okay, that's fine. If you could see the number of times I've messed up doing these broadcasts, I've played the wrong video, put the wrong people on, well, I hope it didn't go too wrong. That's fine, it's fine. So what kind of ways is it possible to create access to the resources if you can't get into Blackboard? So I guess the main conclusion that we've come to is we would set up the main courses with gated information within Blackboard Learn, keeping the old approach, not changing everything all at once. However, the courses that do want to share some resources openly would have a second parallel site that is open to the public. And how this parallel size should be structured that's still an open question. Right, I mean, it's, you know, I'm thinking of MIT OpenCourseWare, so it's not the course itself, but somehow it houses all the content. But I mean, ideally you don't want to have duplication of the course content, right? Right, since one of the goals, at least to me personally, of sharing open educational resources is to reduce the reinventing of the wheel that's going on everywhere at all times. So if we're duplicating our own content, we're not exactly helping ourselves there. But yeah, so loads of approaches from loads of different institutions, some are more effortful than others. Some sites are very, very polished where they will do high-end courses that are tailored specifically for public audiences or for example, produce textbooks. And these are not something that you can take from a course that we've been teaching at university and just put out there without a massive effort into recreating, restructuring, remaking what we have. But rather publishing materials in the way we already have is kind of a slightly different use case. So here we come into the space of differentiating between textbooks and MOOCs and open courses and just repositories, referritories and so on, we'll get into that later I think. Yeah, all right, just dump Blackboard, but obviously that's... There's, I'm sure there's the reasons like you mentioned, but that's, I have not followed the features of course LMSs or VLEs, but like, not providing public access, wow. Yeah, I suppose everything has its own uses and what it's meant for. As one learning technologist in our School of Informatics observed, it's as if institutions go through waves over time. They're saying, hey, let's let everyone do their own approach. You're decentralized, it's too complicated to be central. And then things become very, very different. They start to diverge in different ways. And now we want a unified experience for our students because we can't find anything when every course does its own thing. So let's have a unified platform and then they converge. And now it's not working for all the courses to have one same platform. So let's diverge, just keeps going back and forth every few years. Yeah, so it's the problem with platforms. I was in a conversation doing a podcast with Delmar Larson from Libre Text and he really talked about the problem of, when you start adopting and remixing open textbooks and then you get remix, you can't track all the revisions because then they all get slightly separated. And so how do you solve the problem of even unraveling version control? Yeah, that's the tough one we've talked about as well. And we were making plans or talking about how we might track that. And as far as, because we get asked for the BC collection, do you track all the adaptations? I said, we can't. You have to set up your boundaries so that what you deliver is of high quality. And yeah, Vid, listening to you talk about different people doing their own thing. And what I've noticed when we put a call out to create a textbook or a course, often the faculty member who, even though we say we want broad use, everyone's got their ideas about, I want a book from my course, the way I teach. And those books kind of make me think and those books can still be changed. But if they're too broad, they're of no use either. So anyway, yeah, individuality, many versions, keeping high quality, all, I think just things that, well, open ed, I was thinking about publishing. So I was a writer in my previous career and worked with big publishers. And I realized, and then so I was on the other side of the fence, I wasn't the writer anymore. Now I'm the managing editor and project manager. And to see what that's like to be helping the author do their work without saying you have to copy edit your own work. You know, that doesn't work. But seeing what the other challenges are, except with open education or open educational resources, you have additional challenges that you don't have in regular publishing because you're dealing with the open copyright licenses.  And so that was one of the points that we stressed with and when we do stress with authors that we have you can't pull something in as one-time permission only. It's not open, man. Yeah, and I wonder, I mean, a different topic but maybe a bit, no, some of this like, I mean, BC campus has really been so good at supporting and sharing materials for addressing accessibility. Like what are some current challenges in sort of keeping up or keeping that consistent across the collection? Well, we, I'll just digress for a moment. So we didn't start out that way. We recognized it, but it's a lot of, it's work. So part of it was defining what accessibility was in the beginning. And now we have the accessibility toolkit. And Amanda Kooge was one of the authors of that. And then Josie Gray has become our resident expert. So part of it is when you put a call out and ask faculty authors to create a textbook, we always say in the contracts, you must make this accessible. So it's like any aspect of publishing ensuring that that has been addressed and it has been addressed consistently throughout all the resources. And our definition of accessibility is changing. So diversity and inclusion and equity is entering into that. And I remember asking the question years ago, what do we mean by accessibility? That's a pretty broad term. Well, we were primarily talking about visual, if somebody is blind or low vision, but that has been expanded. So one, making sure it's in place and then trying to keep up with how that area is evolving. And then the technology behind it as well. So screen readers that people are using, are you capturing everything in a book so that a person of low vision can get all the information? Yeah, and the one that like we forget about a lot is like print accessibility or PDF because we tend to think of this stuff as online and in reality, a lot of learners, especially in remote areas have to rely on print materials. That's right. That's one of the biggest barriers right there is, you're trying to create accessible features for reading online, but what if you can't afford a computer or don't have internet? Yeah, we've addressed that somewhat looking at Northern communities, remote communities. And that's where you go to print copies. Or the other one too is we have, we just finished or we're at the tail end of the production for adult basic education because in British Columbia to get your grade 12 equivalent is the tuition is free if you're a resident of BC. And so we wanted to create the materials that went with that schooling to be free as well. So if you get someone who is semi-literate or not literate yet and they're learning to read, I remember working on the BC read series with that author that was 12 different books. And they said, well, people who are learning to read aren't always computer literate either. So the two literacies can go hand in hand. And it was then realized we had to make sure that these books could be cleanly and easily printed. Right, is this anything that you're involved with at Enver Vid or understand how the university is dealing with accessibility? I think here would bring us on another tangent, but we've got an accessibility working group that's just recently formed itself. I'm always talking from perspective of the School of Informatics because that's where I'm based. There might have been other initiatives around the university and other schools. But in our case, yeah, we're considering, for example, during lecture recordings the use of mic for anybody either deaf or hard of hearing, captioning on any videos, fonts that are adjustable for anybody with dyslexia or using more images and less text on slides when presenting something. For anybody with photosensitivity, different color schemes so that they could have, for example, black text on white or white text on black or a print friendly version black and white. It's a variety of considerations that can go into it. I don't know if I found the right link here for, I found the main equality, diversity and accessibility is kind of under there somewhere, but I'm not surprised to hear that your university is definitely on this. So yeah, great conversation here. And I think, Nate, is it time for some bingo? Well, it's funny because I've been losing with great interest and have had my forays into all these topics everywhere from that whole question that it was bringing up of the difference between a repository and an archive and an LMS and all the work that you all do at BC campus to house materials and platforms like press books and also make it available in LMSs and all that work. There's just such a complex field just in the technology delivery aspects of it even before you get to print. So then when you just get to print, it expands. But one of the instigations behind the bingo which I can share a link for here was to try, it started out actually the way educators will with a hope of maybe creating a rubric so that we could perhaps, oh, got it. You got it up there. Yeah, I was about to share a link because you have it. So the beginning instigation of this collaboration between multiple people was to somehow have a rubric that one could use to sort of take a look at the openness of some kind of educational activity and just understand the ways in which it might be open. And we already discussed how openness can have so many different definitions. But as we got further into it, we decided that the idea of a rubric itself was not open enough for us. And so we kind of transformed the idea of the rubric into more of a game and that's where the bingo idea came in. And so the idea here is that there could be a bingo card that you could use to kind of hold up against some kind of educational activity or even resource and then just explore some ways that it might be open perhaps by coloring in or putting markers on certain squares where you felt like the openness of that activity or work was at least present in some way. And so on the, I guess that's from my point of view at the left hand simpler version of the bingo card there which just has 16 boxes. Those boxes represent sort of different kind of ingredients of openness that you might have. And those include things like, are the materials in some way open? Are the activities somehow open? Are the skills somehow open? Are the tools somehow open? Are the, is it open for different kinds of people? Have different roles at different places, different times. So it's sort of like all the nuts, the one that's on the left on the screen that probably on the right have been in where you're looking at it. And so that's sort of the simple version of just like all the things that you could ask is this thing open in this activity or resource? But then we went a little bit deeper. Oh, I'm sorry. And I've explained them backwards. That's actually the one that's on the right, the simpler one. And the one on the left actually adds dimensions to every box of ingredients because we realized that there were different ways in which certain things could be opened. So it's probably almost impossible to read on the screen here the way it is shown. But if you visit it yourself, and I don't know that you, if you already showed the link, but this is one of the primary pages where you can get to this resource. You'll see those kind of faint, diagonal lines, which is probably not very accessible, frankly. And those are the different kinds of dimensions that one might be able to see openness happening on. And so when it comes to people, for example, as an ingredient is the people aspect of this educational activity open. You can ask yourself, like, is it open for people to connect in different ways? Is it open to include different kinds of people? Does it help develop? Was it developed with different people in mind? Was it created openly? Were people present in the openness of its creation? Is, are the people in the activity surfaced? Does one have insight and understanding into who created this activity or who's participating in this activity, et cetera, et cetera? And so these same dimensions exist for every square. It kind of got kind of fractally populated, right? But the idea is mainly that you could just use this as a way to kind of prompt your thinking about the degree to which something is open or not. And nearby in the blog where you've surfaced that one, there's a couple of examples where I've actually played bingo with a specific educational activity and ended up coloring in the squares. It's not actually on that page, it's a different post. That page explains everything about the bingo, so I don't have to reiterate it here. But the interesting thing that happens is when you hold up these bingo cards to an actual activity and start to color things in that you notice that are open, it ends up creating a kind of heat map of openness. And then you can kind of see like, oh, this activity seemed to have a lot of openness across the board, but mainly in the sense to the degree that it surfaced the underlying aspects of its creation or something like that. Whereas this other one was super open in terms of time and place, but almost nothing else, right? So like an asynchronous educational activity might be super open in terms of who can take part in it and when, but it could be that it uses proprietary textbooks and a closed learning management system. So the tools and materials aspect of it would not be so open. And it just ended up being a kind of way that you can sort of like not measure, but point and think about the openness of an activity and also maybe see areas where you could open it more. Oh, wow. So what were some of the use cases that you were applying this to? Like what was the situations? Well, it got created in the context of a conference actually where a group of people were supposed to sort of evaluate and judge some open educational activities. And so the idea behind it was a tool that could help them do that, but that's when we started to want to move away from the idea of it being some sort of like assessment of how open something is, because that wasn't even in keeping with the underlying idea of openness, like the idea of having some sort of summative grade about how open something was didn't seem like the right thing to take. So that was the instigation, but the kind of use cases are, you can imagine like as a program or even as an individual instructor, you could hold this card up to say all the classes in a portfolio, whether that was across a department or across everything you're teaching. And you could just ask yourself, how open am I in this ingredient box and this ingredient box or how open is the activity? And it would just give you a way to then see across the board where there was openness and maybe where there was a lack of openness in say a portfolio of different educational activities. Another thing that's kind of interesting is of course everybody has different evaluations of what counts for open. And so if you have a group of people look at the same educational activity and everybody fills out their own bingo card, then you can get some really interesting results about the differences that people saw and it could be like the beginning of a discussion prompt, like, okay, we saw very different things about the openness in this activity. Let's talk about that. Oh, it's fascinating. I'm thinking like, and also like, what if you're able to save your cards over time and so you would have like an evolution, right? And so- Like my goal is to color in as many squares as possible. Fill him in. But yeah, definitely, I love it. It's such a refreshing kind of take besides the plain old square rubric and that kind of approach. The cool thing too is because it's itself, the bingo itself is openly licensed. It's already been transformed, at least in one way. I don't know if you know Abby Elder. She said, is it Ohio State? No, I think she said Iowa. Iowa's Iowa, right, yeah.  Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a fortune teller thing. Yeah, yeah, like, yeah. So she made one of those based on this game and it turned into like a thing where you could like, it would pop up a new question for you. Like, oh, you want to know how open something is? It's like, what question should we ask? Oh, we should ask this question. It was a way to kind of randomize it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I vaguely remember seeing that, but yeah, it was a clever idea because it was that old thing you remember doing as a kid. Yeah, I think they're called fortune tellers. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah. I can never get the folding right to make those work. A little bit beyond my dexterity as a kid. Yeah, me too. I love the idea. Yeah, well, I don't know. In a way, we talked in the beginning about how we're always talking about what openness means and thinking about this as a way because obviously different people are going to have different things they're going to wait and color in depending how you set it up. Or we just give up on trying to define all this stuff and just keep trying to do it, right? Well, I think one of our goals here, sorry to interrupt one more time, but one of our goals here was like there are open boxes on the bingo precisely because you don't want to close it down and never decide that you're done, saying what open is. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. That's okay. Oh, good. I wanted to ask Laurie a question though because I'm interested in how has the experience at BC campus? Like, what kind of things have you learned about general applicability of producing textbooks aiming to make things that work for so many different people? Are there any rules of thumb about what works and what doesn't? Well, I assume you mean my perspective, I mean, as an organization, we're always trying to evaluate what we've done. Well, like I said, I was on the other side of the fence for many years and now I'm on the publishing side. So I have gained a great appreciation for anyone in the publishing game. It's complex. I don't think you can make anything for everyone. It just, as humans, we all want something different but what has helped is for us to figure out what has worked and to try to be consistent in how we work with authors, for example. So it starts from, okay, we've got some funding. Let's figure out how long, you know, what do we want to accomplish with that? So we look at the system, where is there a gap? So we had this happen a few years ago. Well, we need some more open textbooks in ABE adult basic education and the trades was woefully lacking and health and business and STEM. Those were the areas we targeted. Okay, that's great. Now we're gonna try to at least fill some of that too. Okay, we're gonna put a call for proposals out to see who is open to doing this work and would like to apply for these grants. Well, you also have to have some sort of structure as to how you write the call because that's set in the groundwork. You have to lay out your expectations. What's the scope of the projects that will come out of this, including, well, here's a big one. How long does it take to write a textbook? Takes longer than people think. I mean, I have written a couple of books myself and just the writing process for me was a year. So not to expect you can do more than you can do. And then once we, and then also during that process is to figure out from BC campuses side. So we're gonna give this money to a faculty member. What is the support they get at their end, but also what sort of work is it gonna generate at ours? So we need to be there to give them support to check in. And then once it's done, I was mentioning Alan before the show, right now we're in a phase of production. So we have so many OER waiting to be added to the collection but there's a whole production phase that has to go through where you make sure the accessibility is there. Make sure you've got attributions for all the openly licensed work, either original or borrowed. You gotta cover for the book. You got an image, all these little bits and pieces and then finally getting it out there. And then making sure that people know it's there. That's something I do in operations is make sure that we've got it recorded. People know it's there. I mean, it goes into the collection but reminding them that it's there. And as far as fulfilling everybody's need, again, I don't think that's possible but whoever will find that book is a good fit, making sure that that group of people know it's there and then reminding them. And this is usually a continuous thing is you can't assume everybody heard you the first time but say, you can change this. And I remember the beginning of my open ed work is people didn't believe it, especially if you're an academic. What? I can borrow somebody else's work. No, that's wrong. You don't do that. Well, there's a special kind of license. I mean, and also the work's copyrighted. That's why you need a license. And this is what it means. And you still give credit to the author, but it's okay. The person has given you permission to do this. So that it's no simple answer. It's complex. And I find I'm always circling back and reminding people of the basics. Over and over again, I try to cater it to whomever I'm talking to. And then the last thing I'll say is as we provide support to people, we've noticed the audience in BC has become more sophisticated as they've gotten used to use OER, but you always have the beginners. And so the spectrum of the type of support we need to provide has broadened. It's getting a little more difficult because we have more answers we have to provide. But yeah, you have to pay attention and you got to listen to when people are unhappy and why and then capture all of that and try to answer it. Thank you very much. This has been good. I want to throw in my question at the moment. And just because I don't know if you're tired of hearing about it or excited, but like what is going on where you are people reaction to chat GPT or artificial intelligence because like it's been a long time since I seen and we have seen like disruptive technologies come in but the size of this wave has been impressive. Well, it's funny you should say that. Clint, we just had a, I'm just gonna put a link up a blog about this Clint Lalonde wrote it. It came out yesterday about. I think I have it. Did you have that Alan? Yeah. Chat GPT and open education. Yeah. Yeah, we've talked about this. I think there's fear and concern rightfully so. We should always be skeptics but it's a tool and it depends how you use a tool. I remember in university when the side role came in giving away my age and it's like, no, you can't take that into your physics course final or your math course final. That's cheating and pretty soon calculators were allowed and a lot more. So when a new tool like this comes up, we should be critical but if it does more good than harm and we continue to talk, it probably will become part of the toolbox of what we work. Although it was like, we didn't have to figure out whether the slide rule or calculator was giving you a correct answer. There are some things that are like, wait a minute, this is really problematic and I know, and Nate will probably talk about Creative Commons is doing a huge amount of, and we've had Nate and I have conversations like, okay, these image generators, how the heck do you attribute them? And it's not even clear what the license you can put on these things are. And so I think some of the interesting things is like it's battling some of our concepts and our experiences because it is in some ways different from these previous kind of interruptions. And the other thing that I like to think is we don't know how they work or what they do. Like we just put something in and we get something out. Like what is going on behind the machine? So I think Nate might have a few things to say. Yeah, although I was thinking that Vid mentioned that there was a talk of it at Edinburgh too. Yeah, yeah. If you want to say something, Vid. Yeah, sure. We recently had a circle of all the natural language processing researchers in the school discussing about GDPT and other large language models like Bloom that have been recently released. And yeah, the main thing is they are good at generating text based on what it has previously seen. But they can't think. They can't tell what's right and wrong. They will happily, if you ask it to prove why the earth is flat, they will happily oblige and even generate fake references for you to back it up. So some skills become a little bit more relevant. People need to do the fact-checking when they get AI generated content. And so, for example, we're changing some of the questions we're setting in assessments for students instead of asking bookware questions like state the definition of this or explain how that works. We're asking more like, here's an explanation. Can you spot what's wrong and why? Or here's a statement, is this correct? Prove it. That's questions that you can ask at GDPT where you can't trust its answer. So until models evolve far, far more to the point where they can actually think and for our knowledge, we're safe. Yeah. Well, and I should, I'm saying the School of Informatics, they probably understand how this stuff works, but obviously that's really good to hear the way you're rethinking the kind of ways that questions are phrased. And they? Yeah, I mean, that seems like just to chime in on the educational aspect, right? That might, with my open education hat on, that seems like a logical direction to go is, I think a lot of the affordances of open educational practices actually would have an easy time bringing something like chat GPT into the mix because it's not, that kind of educational mindset isn't based on a kind of, there's a set of right answers to a set of canned problems, which would be the thing that something like chat GPT might do very well at answering, right? So to some of the examples that that's giving, I think seem like the right strategy. Sorry, no, I'm choking to death by the motion. I'd create of comments, I'll say that our focus mostly has been thinking about the complexity of copyright in relation to these, as you mentioned. And it's both on the input and the output side, right? Because a lot of different works are being used to train the AI models as it was talking about in order to give them the raw material that they then transform into mathematical probabilities or whatever they do in the black box and then use that as sort of like a raw material to think about how to answer. It's not just a cut and paste operation, right? It's more complicated than that. Oh, thanks. That link should lead to the recent blog articles we've done. But then there's also the output side, like you mentioned, like what is the intellectual property status of a work that's created by generative AI, right? And the funny thing is the answer to both of those questions on inputs and outputs in a jurisdiction like the United States, which has dominated a lot of the copyright law world, is that there's actually a free use exception for machines to ingest material for this kind of purpose. And so it's in the United States, at least according to lawyers understanding where things are now, this could be tested in court, using even copyrighted works as AI training materials is a fair use exception and so allowed. On the other end, if the work is created by a machine and doesn't have significant human, creative input into it, and then under US law at least, that's not considered a copyrightable artifact. And so presumably they would, the outputs would just be in the public domain. Of course, we don't know, like is writing a text prompt considered enough of a human creative input in order to rise to that level? A lot of people are saying no, the US Copyright Office recently issued a ruling. You'll see a blog post on that on our list that said that that wasn't enough from their point of view, but that's not law. It'll be worked out in court cases in the years to come. And what I think it's doing is it's having us just think really carefully about the, where is the line between original authorship and using the wealth of the comments in order to inform your work? And in scholarly practice, like Laurie mentioned, we have a whole system of citation that we use in order to like connect our own thinking to the work that has influenced us, but the artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence doesn't really provide that direct line into its sources. It doesn't cite its sources really. And so there isn't that transparency into the work like we try to maintain in scholarly work. And anything like that you can, I mean, what does it mean for open education in particular? I mean, some of the thing with licensing and reuse, but like, what if Laurie, I'm like working on a draft of a new textbook and I just do a first draft with this. Actually, Cable Green has been saying that that could be one of the great uses, right? Like in areas where we have holes of where we are that we're trying to fill, like you've done so much work, Laurie, to try to fill them. Maybe it could be a tool that could be used for production, but as Vid brought up, like much of what it says would need to be very carefully researched in fact check. And so it's like, we can't just point to it as like a thing that will automatically solve a whole bunch of problems for us. It could be a tool that we could use in certain ways, but it doesn't seem like some sort of like, you know, it will magically, completely transform the production of OER because of all that work that Laurie talked about, has to go into quality OER that chat GPT just wouldn't fully handle. Well, and the whole issue with either incorrect or non-existent citation for information generated are gathered and cobbled together. Open textbooks and courses, they too need citation and referencing. You might borrow a block of information or an image from another openly licensed source, but you still need to cite your work. You can't take credit for the expression of an idea.  So that's what, you know, as we see the limitations of generative AI and the unreliability of the information we're gathering, sure it could maybe, it'd be like part of the brainstorming phase of writing. Okay, give me some ideas, but then I have to go back and substantiate what is produced here. I wonder too with these criticisms coming up, the, if this tool, you know, if it'll be part of the development work, okay, we have to do better when chat GPT goes and gathers information that has to cite so that people gain confidence. That would be nice, but I think then again, it's like, because we don't really fully understand it's not drawing from sources. So it's predicting the text that matches that would make sense for the whatever prompt you put in. And then it's using that to predict and draw upon, you know, citations of work, which it might appear in, but it's just assembling mixes and authors together. And so like we should have no expectations that chat GPT can cite sources because it's not even going to sources. It's just drawing upon this giant statistical relationship of this humongous corpus of text and it doesn't even know what a citation is to me. So yeah, thank you for engaging in this. I think I've been throwing this question into all the sessions because, I mean, it's interesting. And so I think a lot of it is how education, you know, it's like some of these things are gonna be driven from outside factors and this is one. But, you know, and, you know, and I think Vid kind of suggests there's also potential and large too, like there are things that it could do for us. But I just wanna thank everybody for joining me for this and us for this session of OE Week Live, doing one twice every day now for the rest of the week. And so we have one, tomorrow is gonna be in Spanish on Espanol. So we've got some student interns from OE Global and two of our board members and that one will be in Spanish. And we have another Spanish one on Thursday, I believe. And I have one Thursday too that's gonna be half English and half French. So we'll see how that one works out. But I just wanna thank you again and I'm gonna cue the band for the outro music and we'll end the broadcast and thanks for the audience out there on YouTube who decided to show up for this.


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First, I'd like to say thank you to everybody who's been here at the Dakota that's come this morning to our cow calf series called the Dakota Cow Calf Clinics. Today's session is cover crops and cattle. We do have another session that's going to be on Wednesday, February 16th, and that's beef cattle, and it's going to cover beef cattle reproduction. Today's conference is located, as we said, in multiple sites across the state of North Dakota, and basically the eastern part of the state with guest speakers coming from both Carrington here and Botno as well as Fargo and Bismarck are going to be joining us. Our topic for today, as we looked at, was cover crops and how they interact with cattle, and we're going to start off the morning with our county extension agent up in Botno County, Tim Semmler, and he's going to present to us cover crops, value, and cost. I believe that's right, Tim. If that's the case, or please continue on and let us know if things don't work, everybody. Okay, thank you. Okay, thanks, Carl, and good morning. Is my sound coming through okay at all points here? It's fine at Carrington. Oh, okay, good. What we're going to do this morning is I'm going to walk through a little bit of things that happened here in Botno County, over the course of this last year, and I've got this PowerPoint here on soil health cover crops and relay cropping, and I'm only going to go part ways through that, because I'm going to stop at the Carrington data because I'm sure Ezra will be covering that in her presentation. I also have the cover crops chart to demonstrate, so for those of you at the host sites, you'll want to have both my PowerPoint and the cover crops chart up and ready to go on. I'm going to go through slide nine on the regular screen with PowerPoints, and then minimize that, and then just demonstrate that cover crop chart, and then we'll go back, and then we'll go to the whole screen with starting with the pictures of the cover crops that we saw around the county. So with that, we'll go ahead and get started, go to slide two here. This presentation started out visiting with crop producers, and you know, why would you grow a cover crop if you aren't a livestock producer? In Central North Dakota, most livestock producers are diversified, so I think this applies to quite a few people. This past year, and some of these wet years, we have quite a bit of preventive planning or sizable wet areas in the fields, and a reason for growing cover crops on these wet areas or even dedicating fields to it is that if we have plant growth on there versus idled phalloland, you have healthy soil organisms keeping the soil active and healthy throughout the growing season of the year, and if we don't, if we idle this acreage, or if we spray down even the weeds on it, we have the organisms like rhizobia and mycorrhizae that will go to sleep, and of course those are some of the major ones. There's many, many, many more in the soil that keep things going and active throughout the year. Rhizobia, of course, is the bacteria that works with legumes to fix nitrogen in the soil. If we can keep those going so much the better, and then the mycorrhizae is a fungus in the soil that interacts with plant roots to liberate phosphorus in the soil, so it's a win-win situation by keeping some plant growth growing in those fields, even if we have failed or wet acres. Another reason, of course, would be in these excessively wet years to utilize excessive moisture. If we use up that topsoil moisture, additional rains fall in, leeches down the salts deeper into the soil profile, and we do have predominantly calcium salt type soils in the state that will create problems under these wet years. Undercover crops, of course, if we have legumes growing in that acreage, we'll fix nitrogen in the soil, and that's a benefit to the crop the next year. More advantages to growing cover crops. If we choose a tap-roated cover crop, we can bring deeper soil nutrients closer to the soil surface. A major one of those would be sulfur, but also we could see potassium and phosphorus increase by growing some of these deep tap-roated crops, and we'll take a look at some of those on the cover crop chart. We can also break up clay pans by having those deep tap-roated cover crops growing, and we've actually seen some results where they'll do that. We can improve soil organic matter content, which is always a plus. Dave will cover that a little bit more in his presentation, but if we have cover crops that have optimal carbon to nitrogen ratio, that also helps fix nitrogen in the soil and liberate our nutrients in the soil. Of course, for a livestock producer, we can provide high-quality late-season grazing for cattle, sheep, any livestock that will utilize forage. Basically, in choosing a cover crop, we're thinking about implementing this on your operation. What are your goals for a cover crop? What are some of the negatives on cover crops? Certain seed mixes can use up existing fertility. Is that a good trade-off? If we think about the cover crops that we grow, such as the grassy-type crops, the sedan grasses, the millets, maybe oats, maybe barley, those will utilize nitrogen, but if you're utilizing excess moisture and getting those salts to leach down, maybe it's a good trade-off for that particular year. Another thing to think about is crop insurance limitation. There is a difference between prevented planting and failed acres and how you can utilize those acres. In the case of prevented planting, you cannot harvest or graze those crops after November 1st. Well, we all know that in this particular part of the world that November 1st it can be pretty touch-and-go, whether or not we have a snow cover and can utilize those crops. I think maybe that needs to be worked on a little bit by producers through their insurance companies to see if they can get that liberated a little bit. In the case of failed acres where you planted a crop and it flooded out and then you seed in the middle of the summer, actually there are less restrictions on those, so you can utilize those earlier than November 1st. Also, the cover crop choice affects the residue left on the field next spring. Do you have a strictly no-till operation or do you have somewhat of a reduced-till operation or conventional-till? All of those factors enter into your decision whether or not to grow a cover crop and or the choices that you would take in putting a cover crop on those acres. What are some of the seed costs involved in the handout that I gave all of the sites? This is just simply some of the costs that I found for some of the major crops that are probably used by people experimenting with cover crops. So it varies, but these are the numbers that I put together. And the main idea here would be to shop around. You can find large variations in the costs of the different cover crops that you might choose as well as the quality. So make sure you ask questions of the seed dealers after you research the subject and decide what you want to go with. Not just any radish will do. If you want a large tap-rooted radish, you have to get the radish hybrid of the posha, so to make sure that you get those, you can also buy just plain radish seed that would be similar to the garden radish as it should grow. So ask some questions of the seed dealer before you commit to buying that. Okay, what would be some cover crop considerations?  You know, what's the cost? Are you going to mix your own seed? It's a good use of leftover seed at the end of the seeding season. Maybe you've got peas in the bin. Maybe you've got barley. You can cheapen that mix by using bin-run seed as long as it's clean and won't introduce other weeds to the ground. Use up some of that stuff so it's not sitting around and then maybe buy what you need to supplement that. You know, what is the time of year you're going to seed this? If it was preventive planting, you have basically all summer long to get this growing. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And as soon as it's available. If you have flooded out crop, such as my case, I'll show you some pictures in a little bit, then you have to wait until things dry down before you can get that going. You know, what are you going to choose? Warm season versus cool season cover crops. Again, that cover crop chart will help you in those selections. You know, what's the seeding rate? Generally speaking, we're seeding about half the commercial rate as you would when you seed a crop for commercial production. Plus, you're doing some blends out there. So, you know, another thing to consider is preceding weed control. How are you going to do that? These crops aren't magic by any means. They need elimination of competition. So be sure that you do some type of preceding weed control, whether it's tillage or chemical or something else. And also, what's your goal? Are you going to graze it or not? Are you using it to increase soil organic matter? Are you going to provide late season grazing? All those things will be a consideration when you're looking at growing a cover crop. Okay. Again, on the handout, I got these seed recipes and I put up here. These are not gospel. These are just some thoughts that I put together of different mixes and what the cost would be. Again, the rates are about half the commercial rate and they're based on the cost I put together for 2010. And you can see as you look across there, I've got all, you know, some mixes that are predominantly just a cool season recipe, some that are a mix of cool season and warm season. And again, depending on what time of the year you're going to get these crops growing will be dependent on what mix you decided to put out there. Okay. Let's take a look at that cover crop chart. So I'm going to minimize the PowerPoint right now and go to that USDA ARS cover crop chart. And an example of that is on the back of that handout that I had along with the website. If you want to download this thing, it's a pretty small file. It's a runs in Adobe format. So if you, you can get Adobe for no charge on a computer and you can download this from the USDA ARS Mandan site and that site is printed for you on the handout. This is a really handy little chart. All you have to do, it's set up like the periodic chart. And all you really have to do is go to the different selections and decide which one you want to go with. But you see that the reason I like it even just for a handout is that it has things broken down into first of all, cool season on the left hand side, left hand to two thirds of the way across. It's got all the crops broken down into cool seasons. Then it's got the warm season crops on the right one third. It also has grasses on the right and left columns. And then the broadleafs are in the center. We also have the legumes down there that are in the brown squares and the blue squares in the case of the warm season, warm season crops. So all you really have to do to find out more is click on the various crops to see what they look like. And then you can return, but it gives some pretty good characteristics. So we'll just take a look here at the turnip, the purple top turnip shows a picture of what they look like. Basically breaks it down into what it is. You know what type of growth it is. It's a root crop, of course, high water use, poor salinity tolerance. It has a seeding dip for you on there, a quarter to half an inch. This is a small seeded crop like canola. So you have to seed it shallow. Crude protein content in the tops and the roots, broken down, talks about whether or not it works with the mycorrhizae fungus in the soil. So all of those things. Now all you have to do to return to the main chart is hit the back to the chart. And let's go take a look at radish. Here's the radish that will break up soil clay pans. And again, it's in the same family as a purple top turnip and produces a big taproot.  We had 30 inch tall radish plants, which I'll show some pictures here in a little bit growing in the county that were seeded in early August. But yet the taproot only got to be about a foot long and about three quarter inch in diameter. So it looks to me like in order to get the large taproot system, you'd have to get this one going in June sometime, or at least by the first of July so that you can get advantage of breaking up soil clay pans and maybe bringing up some deep nutrients. So we'll go back and look at a couple more here. Let's just choose Lupin, one of the cool season or Lentil, one of the cool season legumes. And of course that one will fix nitrogen in the soil. Again, a little bit deeper, deeper seeding depth. It will work there. Okay, we'll go back. Let's choose a warm season broadleaf amaranth over here. That's what amaranth looks like relative of the redred pigweed. It will work in these situations. Again, many different species. It's a low water user, but will grow in the warm part of the season, tolerant to heat and drought. Seeding depth is deeper, crude protein okay. You know, again, does not work with the mycorrhizae soil fungus. We'll take a look at one more and then we'll get out of this one. Let's just take a look at, pearl millet would be an example of a warm season grass here. Again, very tall growth, very similar to Sudan grasses. Upright plant architecture, low water use again, poor salinity tolerance. Again, you can seed it a little bit deeper than some of these other ones. Basically kind of average protein, but this one does work with the soil mycorrhizaeal populations to help work with that. So real handy chart for anybody to use. And even if you just have the handout, it's something that will be useful I think to producers in helping form their opinions. But if you have a computer and have access to the internet, you can download it. No charge from the ARS site. Okay, any questions on that? Comments? Tim, this is Carl at Carrington. Are you presenting the pictures up on the screen, or are we supposed to be doing it here? Well, you're supposed to be doing it there unless you can zoom the camera onto my screen. That has worked before, but that's why I sent the PowerPoint. Okay, gotcha. We have handouts here, so that's not a problem. Good enough, but okay, we're going to close out this cover crop chart now and I'll go back to my PowerPoint and we'll be starting on slide 10. And we can go to the full screen now, because we'll start with some pictures. For you, there is the CD, in case you wanted to look at it. Okay, everybody get there. Okay, on slide 10 here, do you want to see this next season? These are some pictures I took of my farm after the June rains of last summer, and I've got about 70 acres of crop land that I crop on the home quarter along with pasture and that sort of thing. This last year I seeded about one half corn and one half flax, and by the time we got to the end of the May, this is what it looked like. I had about 50% flooding on those acres. So if we don't utilize this excessive moisture, we're going to have the same problem the next season. And then of course with the snowpack out there, the way it is right now in most of the state, if you were relatively soaked up going into fall freeze up, you can certainly have some problems this next year. Okay, so what had I decided with the cattle and that sort of thing and with fairly sizable acres of failed crop that I'd need to do something with it. So I had to wait until about the first of August before I could get in and do something with these spots. And again it was about 25 acres out of the 25 to 30 acres out of the 70 acres. So I got in there and got those cleaned up, got them ready to do some planting. What I just decided to do is mix my own mix. So I got a hold of some oat seed, bought some turnips and radish, kind of a simple mix, and I just set it up in the hopper wagon with the oats and blended in turnips and radish seed out of the bag and going into the auger of my little air seeder there. And of course the guys are more advanced and their farming can laugh at my antique equipment but I guess it works. So that's all I did is I kind of scooped the radish and the turnip together, about a half of each per acre with 30 pounds or about a bushel of oats, and my costs ended up being $13.35 an acre. Okay, so we had some problems with moisture. My goal was to get this seeded by the 15th of August but between August 1st and the 10th you know I'd gotten it worked up and then we had more rains and we had to go back in there with roundup and spray down the volunteer weeds again and got to be late August before I got this seeding in there. But you want to seed this stuff shallow when you're thinking of radish and turnips and those types of crops you're basically dealing with a canola seed and that needs to go in about a half an inch deep and the oats and if you deal with some of those crops of course if we just get those into moisture whether they're shallow or deep they're going to grow pretty well. So we got them seeded the 27th of August by the 7th of September. Next slide. Here we've got the pictures of emergence of the crop starting to come up pretty good. We of course got some more rains on this after we got it seeded so it was just absolutely perfect growing conditions for these cover crops and up comes the radishes and turnips along with the oats seed, good emergence of September 7th. Okay, this is a picture on October 1st of the stage as you can see there we've got about two or three inch oats and by this time you can start to differentiate between the radishes and the turnips. The radish will have scalloped leaves along the margins where the turnips will have more of a rounded leaf and more resemble canola. So we'll take a look at those but both of them you know the mix was pretty good the the population is pretty good as you can see by the 1st of October. Here's a little bit more of a close-up on October 1st and here's a good example right in the center of the screen we've got the scalloped leaf and we've got the radish out there this is a posh radish hybrid and then right next to it is more of a rounded leaf again it more resembles either tamed mustard or tamed canola you can see there that would be the the purple top turnip. Okay what about some cooperators in the county that also tried this what were their results? We had a cooperator by the name of Glenn Cunningham out at Lansford and he had prevented planning right next to his farm he runs you know an average herd of cattle for this part of the country and he seeded earlier than I did August 3rd. He had about 40 45 acres next to the place he had a custom blend put together by a seed company that he deals with the local elevator I was 25% oats 25% millet 90% peas 60% barley 9% turnips and 6% radish. Seed cost per acre for him was $22.65 so another basically about another $10 per acre than what it cost me to blend my own. He went ahead and grazed the cows after November 1st. His comments were herd adapted quickly no digestive upset on that mix out there and actually his calves reduced creep feed consumption while they're out on the cover crop. So next slide shows what that looks like you can see a really lush stand here this was you know way past my knees it was at least 30 inches tall you can see in there the white flowering radishes in the background and in the foreground you can see some of the purple top turnips and of course there's the barley and the millet mixed in there just a really lush looking crop this was October 14th. Here's a little bit of a close-up on the Cunningham's operation you can see in there and actually it wasn't in the seed mix but right in the center we've got a lentil growing in there and then we've got the radishes and turnips there in the in the background but that wasn't supposed to be in there but I assume that the seed company had an extra bucket of lentil so they probably just threw it in the mix just to clean things up. Here's a close-up of the turnips and radishes on October 14th again seeded August 3rd. You can see the turnip is about the size of a golf ball a little bit larger more more like a tennis ball and then the radish has about a three-quarter inch top on it and about you know eight to ten inches long so again if a guy's going to capitalize on the deep tap-rooted cover crops I think we need to get an earlier start on August 3rd and certainly July 1st would be a goal maybe even the 20th of June and so that would be on preventive type preventive planting type acres or something that you could get in relative or early even if you dedicate a field for that. Okay another cooperative we had was a young cattle crop sky by the name of Pat Flaherty out of Westope and again he had prevented planting again this was right next to his place and he seeded the mix on July 26th and he again just took and pretty much blended up his own. He had on hand bin run confectionary sunflowers, RVCPs and then he bought millet turnips and radish. I didn't get the cost from him but you could refer to the charts for for that. He turned and heard out on November 1st again and was back there on November 17th and took pictures and it was grazed clean off. Again a pretty good sized acreage next to the place but the cattle utilized it all and they even grazed the roots of the turnips and the radish is right down to the soil service. When I was out there on the 14th of November all you saw was the top the bottom half of the turnips just a white ring in the soil and both producers will incorporate this into their system as an annual forage management tool whether they have you know cover crops or not or whether they have prevented planting or not. So this is a picture of Pat Flaherty's on October 12th. Again a very tall growth we're looking at probably 30 to 35 inch tall cover crop out there. Again the white flowering radishes in the foreground. You can see peas mixed in there. He was relatively heavy on the peas compared to the cunning hams. This is a little bit more of a close-up. It shows you can see down in there you've got the purple top radish sticking out of the ground but this is relatively heavy soil and you can see that those radishes and turnips were you know loosening up the soil and getting things to you know really separate there. This shows next slide here shows a mixture of peas in there radishes turnips and that sort of thing. This is a picture of Pat Flaherty's root crops. Again we've got about a tennis ball sized turnip on there and then we've got actually a radish that is about three-quarter inch on top and a little bit shorter than it was in cunning hams simply because I'm sure there's plenty of moisture there and the soil is a little bit heavier than over at the Lanceford site. Okay back to my farm. How did I pan out? Growing period was basically over by the 24th of October we'd had enough you know hard frost by that time that you could see even the the radishes and turnips which are pretty well frost hardy starting to slow up and so I didn't have that much growth out there we had about six to eight inches total growth so we didn't really get a measure on the total tonnage. A few comments here about the the salinity of tolerance of these crops this picture is an area that is compared to the other area that I just showed relatively salty gives me problems it's a saline alkyli area about two to three acres in size and you can see that actually the turnips and the radishes didn't do well at all this area in fact they had killed them out. You can see on the ring around the outside where there was less flooding and salinity that the oats survived but very little growth out there so if I want to do something with the crops cover crops in this area I might want to consider sugar beet or sunflower there's something that will actually do fairly fairly well on the on the flooded and saline areas so if that's your problem the the turnips and radishes aren't going to do very well for you even small grains won't. Okay this is just a shot here on October 24th again it shows the the radishes and turnips mixed with the oats you've got kind of yellowing leaves on there which means they've had about all the frost they can take so there really wasn't any reason to let it grow any longer and let the herd pretty well take and utilize what they could. This just shows a shot of the overall growth out there eight to ten inches tall with the oats and the radishes in the turnips and so that's about all we got and again if I did it another year I would certainly try to get it going earlier than I did. Okay and then finally this is a shot of the two root crops on on my acreage that was seeded August 27th. You can see here that we've got a root on the radish only about you know again three-quarter inch in diameters or the the turnip doesn't penetrate very far only about three to four inches down and the radish is only about half an inch in diameter and about six inches long so we utilized some moisture out there but and provided some forage and grazing the cattle absolutely loved it they cleaned that off first before they grazed in the corn and and that's that's the way it went so that's my experiences I guess on cover crops I think they really have a fit for both diversified cattle end grain operation as well as just the cattle operation I think there's definitely some use for them out there you can save costs by blending your own seed if you want the best seed source you probably want to get something blended up by by a seed dealer so with that I think that is it yes I've got some stuff on relay crops here but we're going to let Ezra cover that from the Carrington Center so with that I guess I would ask if there's any questions from the group and turn it back to Carl