[Offscreen male] So, I just wanted to start out, so me and Mike Pasa put this
together and um Mike feel free to jump in on any of this um specifically.
But, one thing that we knew that uh Matt and Cody are gonna be focusing on the
research those warm season cover crop mixes.
And so, we didn't really include this in our video at all.
Um instead we kind of choose, we actually added some demonstration plots up in
Lewiston where we have those research plots as well.
And that's kind of what our video is going to be covering today.
I just wanted to echo what Cody said, we're seeing a lot of the same things
Cody is up on those Lewiston plots.
Um, we're seeing it's really hard to spring, get the irrigation all the way
across, especially to the edges of our treatments.
And we are however seeing a little bit more like he mentioned of the turn
up the brass cause underneath of those cover crop mixes.
And that is probability because we planted earlier.
However, we really kind of took a risk with that because even after we planted we
had about two days where we were really close to freezing.
So, that was an issue that we ran into up there.
Um, Mike do you have anything to add to that?
[Mike] No, uh sounds good.
Um yeah I am good with it.
Ok perfect.
Well we will get started with the video and we will go from there.
[Calm guitar music]
Hey my name is Mike Pace I'm with the USU extension here in Box Elder county and
with me today is Jake Hadfield from Cache County and we're with USU extension.
And today we're out at the Lewiston research farm here in Cache Valley
Utah.
Yeah, we're gonna be discussing some of these different cover crops.
These cover crops have actually, just for a point of reference, have been planted
about seventy days ago around May 14th and they just received regular irrigation.
So we kind of wanted to go through, give you a tour of what these cover crops look
like, just so you can get an idea of what we're looking at with different species.
So, talking a little bit about cover crops why we're using cover crops, why we/re
looking at cover crops and that here in Utah the natural resource conservation
service and USU extension have been looking at growers that are interested
in putting these cover crops and taking better soil health of that uh other soils.
And so, what we're trying to do is look at those types of plants that we could put
in the fields and the ground that are gonna help benefit the plants.
And uh, just do that research that we got that, Jake.
Yeah. We're really looking to see if these cover crops are gonna help improve our
soil heath.
And as some of the things that we are really looking for is to see if we can't
somehow put these cover crops into different crop rotations in order to be
able to include that extra soil health while still making sure we have production
practices going in different agriculture lands.
Yeah, so for example this field right here that we got um it was you know uh there
was no pre crop in the ground and that here was basically tilled in the spring
time when we put it in.
I think a lot of interest is, you know once we pull that grain crop off or the
corn crop off what can we put in afterward to kind of stabilize that soil and keep it
so that we got, you know moisture and that organic matter back into the soils.
And we are just trying to figure that out.
Yeah exactly.
What we've got here, we are gonna show you are these just single species.
And then we are gonna look at, uh later on in the video we are gonna look at some
mixes that we got here.
And so we're standing in front of the Daikon Radish um right here you can see
it's actually got quite a bit of growth on it.
There's seed pods, there's flowers in that here, in it.
We just kind of pulled one of them right now, so that's about an inch and a half in
diameter and about three to four inches long.
The idea of this plant is, is this is gonna be one of those that has a leafy top
but the work of this one is, it's gonna grow deep, it's gonna loosen up those
compacted soils in that for us, its gonna loosen that up.
Yup, perfect.
Ok, one of the first plants we are gonna be talking about is mustard specifically.
Now one of the great properties that we have with mustard is it has great
fumigated properties.
And so it can help with insects and different things like that.
Overall what we saw with the mustard is it grew very quickly, it was one of the first
plants to bud and bloom.
And we also see, if you zoom in, you can see the seeds pods themselves, we have a
lot of seed pods that are produced.
This also can be used as a crop, can be harvested for mustard.
But can also be tilled under and be a good green manure to use, just for your soil
health in general.
Ok so our next crop that we want to talk about is the purple turnip.
And so you can kind of see this one right here, um again this about 70 days worth of
growth onto this.
There's a lot of material that has been stored up into this root, a lot of times
that is what we are looking for is a crop like that is gonna take up the nutrients,
store it in the root and then gonna break that down as it decomposes in that if you
leave it in the field or if you turn it and work it up.
Um a lot of times growers, you know if you got livestock in that, that you're
gonna be feeding in late fall, you know the turnips and that are a cool season
crop and so they are gonna stay around and actually um you'll see cattle will be out
there foregining in the field.
And that they will actually pull these up and consume the turnip as well.
And so it can be a good source of livestock feed with this.
And uh you know great, great thing to add into the cover crops here.
The next crop we have is um millet.
We actually have a couple different millets out here um but specifically
what we're gonna be talking about this is German millet.
And you can tell, I mean you can see it's kind of like your cereal grain, kind of
like your grass it's got a thin stock.
It actually makes that thin stock makes it great and a cover crop mixture just
cause it can be able to be used with multiple other crops.
Um your millet can also be harvested but overall this can really just help thicken
up your cover crop to help you get the most out of planting either a mixture or
just planting millet by itself to be put back into the soil.
This is actually a forage oat is especially bred for forage production
not so much for oat production.
One of the things with the forage oat you can kind of see here if you look further
out into the plot you see that is started to lodge and so it's got quite high not as
weak here and so its fallen over and that is what we call lodging in this particular
one.
But uh most of us are familiar with it very good product to you know crop
to have in a cover crop with that with us.
Talking about is hairy vetch now one thing to remember about hairy vetch is it's a
legume so what it's gonna be doing is providing nitrogen down into the soil its
gonna be fixing nitrogen as well as increasing the soil microbe activity.
Which is really good for cover crops that's what we want to see.
Now if you look down at the plants specifically you will see how thick it is
here how thick its grown in.
You can really see its gonna add a lot of green to it you know you can use this as a
green manure.
One of the things to remember is that if you put this in a mix, one of the nice
things is while crops are growing all over the top of it this is actually gonna be
growing underneath.
And if you could get a good thick stand underneath like this while those other
plants are growing up you really can get a really good yield and just have an overall
good cover crop mix.
We're in some triticale again something very typical that we see in a lot of
triticale will be in some of our three-way mixes where we've got triticale,
wheat, oats and that in there or another small grain crop.
Very useful you can see gets a lot of growth in that to it under the right
conditions and just can't say enough good about triticale.
The main thing with it is if you're going to be grazing it or using something like
that you probably want to either use a beer list or an almost triticale because
otherwise you can get some of these ons that will dry down and as livestock forage
on it can get cause abscesses and things like that in their mouths and that.
So just some concerns with triticale but again a very good grass type uh crop to
put in your your cover crop.
All right perfect so this cover crop that we have here obviously it's peas here.
We've actually got two varieties, we've got a winter pea as well as our vika pea.
And so peas are really good again they're a legume they're going to provide some
activity to the microbial status in the soil.
Overall what we're going to see is they're going to fix nitrogen in the soil to be
able to help improve the overall nitrogen in the system.
One thing that we do see with pea however is you can kind of see here the pea is
falling over a little bit.
If the peas themselves don't have something to climb on a lot of times
that's what you're gonna see if it could you know a triticale or something it could
climb up on that.
So a lot of times peas do really well when they're in a mixed system with
other species.
So this is one of our first mixes that we have.
We've got about four different plants in this mix.
We've got some grass in our sedan grass, we've got uh the hairy vetch, we have
buckwheat and we have radish in that in here.
Most of the mixes that you're going to get are going to have four to eight, maybe 10
at the most of different combination of plants in there.
You see in this plot we've got quite a bit of biomass in that here with the grasses.
We've got you know the radish in here that's going to take and you know store up
some of those energy in that into the roots that are going to break down and
decompose over time when we terminate this area.
But really a nice looking mix of some of those different plants we showed earlier
on in our single species working together for us as the cover crop.
All right this is another one of our cover crop warm season mixes.
So this one actually has 11 different species of cover crops.
We got three different species of grasses, three different of legumes, a couple
species of root crops as well as just a couple broadleaf species like canola.
Now overall what we see is this really just has a lot of plant diversity that's
something that we're really looking for with cover crops.
I don't know if you can hear in the background but bees are loving this.
You can see all the different flowers there's a lot of bees involved with this
and you can just see how much yield that we've got just with all these different
species involved in this mix overall.
Okay so this is another one of our warm season grass mixes or excuse me cover crop
mixes here.
This is a six way and so we've got two different things of grasses; the Sedan
grass and the triticale they make up about fifty percent of this mix right
here.
In the legumes where we've got the hairy vetch and the winter pea in here, they're
about uh forty percent and the rest of it there are the radishes and mustard in that
you can see in here.
And so again a really nice mix and that complements what we're trying to do here
with cover crops.
Okay all right so this is actually one of our cool season cover crop mix.
This is an eight-way mix.
As you can see about 50 percent of this is going to be involved with grasses another
about 50 percent is going to be legumes and we have a small amount here that are
actually going to be broad leafs and different things like that.
You can kind of see how the cool season is a little bit different with the selection
you're going to have.
You're going to have more of a kind of a forage out triticale different things like
that overall.
But still, same principle we're trying to get multiple species involved so that we
can be able to just have that different plant diversity for the cover crop mix.
Okay so what you're looking at here this is actually a plant called facilia it kind
looks like a thistle and in our cool season mix.
You probably saw it thinking it was thistle but this is actually one of the
broad leaf plants that's included in the mix.
It's supposed to be pretty good at you know just providing overall yield as well
as just a good green manure crop.
Okay so this is a our last of our cool season mix this is a nine-way mix.
We've got oats, we've got prusa millet in here it's kind of our grasses they're
going to be about 35 percent of this mix and then we have our radishes, our winter
peas, our turnips.
You also see in this mix we've had them throw in some sunflower, this is not the
typical sunflower that you're going to see along the roadside but it's actually a
black seed sunflower.
There's also a little bit of graze of that grazing corn that's out in here with the
winter pea in that but again just kind of a nice cool season mix we've got good
growth in that out of it here and uh should do well as a cover crop for us.
All right that was just some examples here I actually wanted to show one picture real
quick that we have as well.
If I can bring it up here.
So those last cover crops we just talked about um this is actually an aerial
picture from drone.
I just think this kind of shows it shows how thick it is through the sand and
everything so let's see if I can share it here.
Can you guys probably see that now but that's just an aerial view of those last
few mixes that we were talking about those demonstration mixes.
And you can just really see how thick throughout these cover crops are able to
get I mean these were planted on May 14th, that's something to remember and they have
received irrigation regularly.
So, really these they've had ideal conditions overall but you can definitely
see how thick those cover crops are through there um and just see what kind of
impact they could have potentially especially for soil health.
But with that, that's everything that we have so we're, we can move on to the next
one I guess.
If there if there's any questions please put them in the hat or Q&A.