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“Out of all the farmers that I work with that are doing cover crops right now, none of them have decided to hang it up and go back to the old way of doing things.”
— Joe Ailts, Agronomist, Deer Park, Wis.
In this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies podcast, brought to you by GS3 Quality Seed, listen to a conversation with Deer Park, Wis., agronomist Joe Ailts, as he discusses everything from nitrogen for a following corn crop, best cover crop blends following small grain harvest, the most outside-the-box ideas he has encountered as an agronomist and much more.
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The Cover Crop Strategies podcast series is brought to you by GS3 Quality Seed.
Trying to improve your water infiltration? Reduce erosion? Or attract pollinators? How about increase your organic matter? At GS3 Quality Seed, we produce and market cover crops that will help you address your soil health concerns. With knowledgeable dealers located throughout the United States, we offer a wide array of experience and support. Visit our website to find a dealer near you.Full Transcript
Mackane Vogel:
Welcome to the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast, brought to you by GS3 Quality Seed. I'm Mackane Vogel, associate Editor at Cover Crop Strategies. In this episode, listen to a conversation with Deer Park, Wisconsin agronomist Joe Ailts, as he discusses everything from nitrogen for a following corn crop, best cover crop blends following small grain harvest, the most outside the box ideas he's encountered as an agronomist and much more. Today I'm joined by Joe Ailts. Joe, we're going to start this off the same way we always do. I'm going to ask you to tell me your ag origin story and some of your first memories of agriculture.
Joe Ailts:
Well, good morning, Mackane. Thanks for having me on. I like to say that I was born with a green thumb and a competitive spirit, and right out of the gate spent a lot of time following my great-grandmother around in the garden. And she produced some of the most incredible vegetables and flowers I remember from my childhood, and that really stuck with me and carried that through to my college experience. I graduated from university with a degree in biotech, wanted to go work for a seed company, but the rural area I lived in wasn't exactly a biotech Mecca, so I ended up working for a medical laboratory for 14 years before answering the call back to ag. And then when I had the opportunity, signed on with Pioneer, did eight years with Pioneer Seed Company before breaking out and starting my own independent agronomy consulting service here in Northwest Wisconsin.
Mackane Vogel:
Ailts Agronomy, you want to just kind of give us a brief overview of what that's all about and then we can dive in more specifically afterwards, but just give us a brief overview.
Joe Ailts:
I've always wanted to work as an agronomy consultant because trained as a scientist who loves plants, it seemed to be the perfect fit for what my personality type was. We have a unique set of circumstances up here in Northwest Wisconsin. There's not a lot of independent agronomy consultants in the area. Onesie Twosie's here writing 590 nutrient management plans, but as far as true crop scouts that are out there walking fields every day and helping farmers make good decisions on how to best feed and protect crops, unique sort of circumstance, there's just not a lot of folks doing it up here. And so wanting to fill that gap, I decided to break out on my own, do the whole entrepreneur, start a new business thing. And so far the reception has been fantastic. I'm very blessed to say that I have a lot of opportunity to say, sorry, I can't help you because the schedule's entirely full.
And so in my agronomy business, and we do the traditional corn soybeans with synthetic fertilizers and herbicides, but I also have incorporated a lot of regenerative practices for the farmers that have expressed interest in doing so. And so the cover cropping and the tillage management piece has really become a big part of the business here. The other part that I find interesting is I'm absolutely fascinated by soil microbiology and with the onset of the commercial ag industry, bringing on a lot of different soil beneficial microbes, finding a lot of farmers, turning to me for advice on how to make better decisions on which biological products may offer improved ROI for their operations.
Mackane Vogel:
Yeah, fantastic. Well, you mentioned Northwest Wisconsin, that's kind of the area you're operating in. Let's talk about cover crops in that area. What do you think is sort of unique about cover cropping in Northwest Wisconsin and what maybe sets it aside or is to other parts of the US?
Joe Ailts:
Sure. Cover cropping in Northwest Wisconsin is really quite unique because we're just a stone's throw from the north pole up here. We are north side of the 45th parallel. Obviously we're over halfway in. That means we've got a pretty darn short growing season. And so oftentimes getting cover crops in after the harvested crops up here can be a real challenge, especially corn. There's a lot of corn that doesn't come off in this part of the world until the end of November, and by then oftentimes the ground's frozen and we just can't get cover crops established. But certainly there's a demographic of growers up here who are open-minded and looking to establish cover crops behind soybean harvest, which can happen anywhere from the mid-September all the way through the month of October. And we've had great success establishing cereal rye, which is the staple cover crop up in this part of the world, and working in those types of systems. Still pretty dairy heavy up here as well.
And for those that are harvesting silage mid to late September, oftentimes we're seeing these guys put in cereal rye as well. And so I would say cereal rye has kind of been a big deal. I'm really impressed with how progressive the farmers are up in this part of the world. We have an awful lot of cover crop cereal rye acres, but I'm also very interested in seeing what else we can do with different types of cover crops or even getting more specific about what varieties of cover crop rye are planted in order to get more purposeful about the cover crops that we're putting in behind the row crops.
Mackane Vogel:
Well, I'm going to have you hold that thought on cereal rye. I want to talk a little bit more about that in a little bit. But while we're on kind of the geography topic here, I saw a recent map that kind of showed cover crop usage around the US. The East Coast just continues to use cover crops a whole lot more it seems than a lot of the rest of the country. What do you think might be the reason for that? I think the primary area that time and time again, I always see as top usage for cover crops is right in that Maryland area around Chesapeake Bay. And so is this maybe just a testament as to how useful they can be for improving water quality?
Joe Ailts:
Sure. I think that plays into it to some degree. I also firmly believe that grower education is probably a major limiting factor here in the Midwest as well. We don't see as much educational resources that I think is as necessary to really ramp up wide-scale adoption. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of great programs out there that have helped farmers understand and learn about how to plug into these systems, but I think there's a lot more that we can be doing out there in the countryside to help show some of the benefits. A lot of it comes back to the timing of being able to get the crops in when we're fighting against winter weather, but also just understanding what the true benefit is. I think that's really where the opportunity lies today, is finding other ways to show the true benefit cover cropping can bring to an operation.
Mackane Vogel:
Yeah, I think that's a very valid point. All right. Well let's get back to the cereal rye now. What do you think is so important about the roots of cover crops and then specifically obviously when we're talking about rye, roots always come up, so let's talk about that for a little bit.
Joe Ailts:
Sure. The root system of cover crop rye continues to amaze me. We can spend hours talking about the benefits here. I think money have come around to appreciate the fact that these cover crops are pumping carbon back into the soil which serve as food for microbes. And I think there's also growing appreciation for the fact of how important microbes are for helping crops grow. And when we think about the time duration in which our row crops are in the ground relative to the time duration that a cover crop like cereal rye is in the ground, we've now effectively doubled the amount of potential carbon that can be pumped into the system to feed the microbes that we know will come back and help our crops in the following season. As a guy who's interested in soil microbiology, for me the impact of cover crops really comes back to what are they doing to help facilitate the soil microbiological community? And that's just one of many aspects where I think we're seeing incredible opportunities in the way that these plants can feed these soil microbes.
Mackane Vogel:
Well, and you mentioned you also focus on small grains, right? I want to get into that a little bit and with small grain overwintering to produce nitrogen for that following year of corn, how do you go about quantifying that? Because that's sort of a tricky topic that always comes up where it's like how much nutrients, how much nitrogen are we really providing for that following crop? What's your go-to there?
Joe Ailts:
Sure. I'm encouraged here again in Northwest Wisconsin to see how the adoption of small grain production is also ramping up here. We've got a lot more folks that are growing rye just to carry over for their cover crop seed for next year. There's a winter wheat market up here that's fairly robust. There's even opportunity for oats that we're now seeing come back in rotation, not so much barley, but I think we'll get there as well as more people start to recognize the benefit that barley can serve as a cover crop. And so when we harvest that late July, early August, we've got an incredible window to do a lot of really neat things with cover crops afterwards. One of the focuses that I'm really interested in is whether or not we can get legumes to produce meaningful amounts of nitrogen prior to the following year's corn crop.
If we establish a legume somewhere mid to late August here in Northwest Wisconsin, we've proven for two seasons that we can get legumes to over winter, which was the primary barrier to doing this more consistently. Granted, we've had two very fluffy winters where it's been easy to do that. However, based on what I saw at the Dairy Forage Research Center here a couple of weeks ago, we know they're breeding for some really winter hardy hairy vetch that can really produce some interesting nitrogen values. Directly to your question, how do you quantify how much nitrogen could be taken as a credit for next year? This really is a challenge for us. Thankfully, there are some resources there that at least give us some guardrails to work with. Pacific Northwest has put out a publication where they've done some studies on how to quantify that by using a cover crop biomass test.
If you go out there and you can grab the legume or whatever cover crop mix you have prior to termination before you put the corn in the ground, that report comes back with a percent nitrogen value and you run that percent nitrogen value through this publication and equation put out by the Pacific Northwest, they will give you a rough estimate of how much nitrogen value is there. Now, very important to recognize that that research was done in environments where that legume cover crop was incorporated through some means of incorporation into that crop. I've been told that those numbers that are calculated for incorporation do not apply to anyone who terminates and let that cover crop residues sit on the surface, in which case there's a separate calculator produced by another organization that you can run those similar numbers too. For me, however, the common denominator here is to get a cover crop biomass test, understand what percent of nitrogen you have, understand what your dry matter is, and then you can make some rough estimates of potentially what credits could be taken for that corn crop.
Mackane Vogel:
Speaking of termination, what are your usual methods for what do you usually recommend in this area?
Joe Ailts:
The simplest, easiest and most economical way to terminate is glyphosate pass right before planting. That's the most common thing. Now, Rodrigo Worley's work out of university of Wisconsin has shown us that if we allow that biomass to accumulate a little bit longer and reach a certain threshold, how you can see potentially significantly more weed suppression, that's exciting research in which case then termination, that might require a slightly different tactic. There's a few roller crimpers out in the countryside and for the guys that have them, they're getting used quite a bit. And so then we're watching the development of the rye to reach enthesis before we go out there and do the roller crimping. And if it's timed perfectly, we see pretty darn good kill on the roller crimping side of things as well.
Mackane Vogel:
Yeah, the crimper stuff has been really interesting. I've seen a lot of makeshift roller crimpers over the last couple of years and it's always amazing to see what farmers can make out of some stuff they've got already in their shop.
Joe Ailts:
Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, even on our own little operation, we run a three-acre hobby farm where we grow pumpkins and sweet corn using winter rye as a cover crop as a map for the pumpkins. I just use a 28 horse tractor with a bucket on front and I set that bucket on the ground and I push the accelerator and we get a pretty darn good crimp just by using the front end of a tractor bucket.
Mackane Vogel:
I'll circle back to those pumpkins in a few minutes. I want to talk about that a little bit too. But besides quantifying that nitrogen, those nutrients for the following crop, what else goes into your decision for developing a cover crop blend following a small grain harvest?
Joe Ailts:
Yeah, great question. I come from the mindset that I like to be very purposeful about how cover crop blends are put together. Cover crop diversity just for diversity's sake looks good on paper, but I think we can do a better job of being more purposeful behind that in selecting species and varieties that achieve certain goals. And I'm excited to see more research coming out now that has started to attribute certain agronomic goals to various cover crop species. For example, in last week's episode with Alex, he mentioned putting flax into a rotation due to its aggressive mycorrhizal colonization characteristics. These are the types of things I get really excited about because now we can be so much more purposeful about having various types of species in there. I have somewhat historically been more hesitant to include the brassicas in there because I was trying to find what purpose do these brassicas really serve?
And then recently stumbled across some information that shows they might be pretty aggressive at helping colonize trichoderma species of fungi. And that completely changed my perspective. We're always learning new information that helps us update our priors here and that's really quite helpful. Now looking at the potential to aggressively colonize trichoderma as a beneficial soil microbe fungus, that certainly has some applications too where you've got various types of diseases such as Fusarium, which apparently trichoderma loves to eat for lunch. And so with this new updated information now we can be more pointed about what types of species go into these plants.
Mackane Vogel:
We'll come back to the discussion in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our sponsor, GS3 Quality Seed for supporting today's podcast. Trying to improve your water infiltration, reduce erosion, or attract pollinators? How about increase your organic matter? GS3 Quality Seed produces and markets cover crops that will help you address your soil health concerns. With knowledgeable dealers located throughout the United States, they offer a wide array of experience and support. Visit their website to find a dealer near you at www.tiltpro.com. Thinking of attending the National Strip Tillage Conference in August? Use the promo code GS3 to receive 15% off your 2024 National Strip Tillage Conference registration. Head to striptillconference.com to register with the promo code. Once again, that's promo code GS3 for 15% off. And now let's get back to the discussion with Joe Ailts. Are there any pests or weeds that have just continued to be a big problem in your area as an agronomist? And if so, what are your go-to methods for combating that?
Joe Ailts:
Yeah. I think the biggest problem or challenge we're dealing with on the weed side of things stems to a unique niche market that we have up here in Northwest Wisconsin in regards to non-GMO soybeans, there is a large proportion of non-GMO beans grown in this part of the world. And obviously when you don't have the ability to use traits to help control weeds, you need to come up with other creative ways of doing so. The chemistry involved in growing non-GMO soybeans is pretty darn intense, obviously minus the glyphosate. This is where we come back to Rodrigo's work and looking at how can we use cover crops to help facilitate the management of these weeds in these non-GMO systems where weed control options are limited. Here I think the cover crop rye has a great opportunity to play a really important role here. And to take that a step further, we've now been dabbling with the ND Gardener variety of cover crop rye and there's a couple of characteristics about this rye that make this almost too good of a fit for Northwest Wisconsin.
One of the key characteristics of this ND variety is that it is much earlier maturing and we're talking upwards of five to 10 days of earlier anthesis. And so with that early spring growth and aggressive early maturity opportunity, that means we can put beans in the ground much earlier than expected rather than waiting for the old fashion VNS to do its thing, which is usually around Memorial Day weekend here up in Northwest Wisconsin. That's just one of the unique characteristics of ND Gardener. The other thing that I just recently learned here too is apparently they've looked at the allelopathic effects of various rye varieties and have found that the ND Gardener variety apparently had the highest allelopathy impact as well. And so that's two characteristics that are really positively working in favor for these non-GMO systems. If we can suppress weeds with a variety of rye that has high allelopathy that is also earlier maturing, again, it almost sounds too good to be true that we've stumbled across a variety that really checks a lot of boxes.
Mackane Vogel:
Last year I think one of the hottest topics involving cover crops was cover crops and drought. Obviously drought was a huge problem all over the US last growing season. This year, I think at least so far, it's almost the opposite of like, we're too wet, we can't start planting yet. We just got more and more rain. Let's talk a little bit about the other side of that equation with cover crops and when it's too wet, how do you kind of manage cover crop and moisture when you're getting almost, I don't want to say too much rain because a lot of people would say, well, there's no such thing as too much rain, but you see what I'm getting at here.
Joe Ailts:
Yeah, certainly. I think one of the lessons that we learned last year was, again, to reinforce just how important termination timing is for cover crop rye. Indeed up here in Northwest Wisconsin, we too got bit by rye. That sucked a little too much moisture out of the system and therefore the corn stands suffered. I will say however, when we counted numbers at the very end of the season, even though those stands of corn that looked like they got beat up pretty bad by lack of moisture early on, they ended up yielding quite respectively at the tail end of things. It was ugly early on, but at the end of the day, I think the numbers came in pretty darn close. Don't get me wrong, there were circumstances where we shaved a few bushels off the corn crop and that wasn't coming back, but generally speaking, overall I think there was certainly some benefits there.
All that armor laying on the soil surface helped held in a bunch of moisture that I think the tilled systems just couldn't hang onto. In regards to this season, which you were right, 100% flip here. The fact that we had to do a really good job at timing a termination meant that a lot of the rye this spring has already been terminated and so because of that termination event, obviously it's not taking moisture out of the system. However, I think we going to be okay, we're going to going to get the corn crop in the ground. We've got some windows here where we can get that done without causing too much damage to the soil or crazing various types of compaction. And I also believe because we had a robust nice stand of rye this spring with adequate moisture, later on this summer when we're begging for more rain, that's really going to come back to help us. Every season's different. Obviously we continue to take our punches here from areas that we don't expect, but at the end of the day, I think everything's going to work out just fine.
Mackane Vogel:
I'm also curious, are most of the growers you work with that are using cover crops also using no-till on most of their acres, or would you say it's not that uniform?
Joe Ailts:
Yeah, great question. The vast majority of the people who are using cover crop rye up here have reduced tillage significantly. However, there are still a few that will use varying degrees of tillage as well. One of the lessons we learned last year in the absence of moisture is that we felt like the soil profile was lacking in oxygen in no-till systems. If you don't have rain moving water through the soil profile, there's no vacuum effect to pull more oxygen down into the root zone. And because of that lesson, there were a few guys out there who historically had been strong no-tillers felt that it might not be the worst idea to go out there with the VT machine, just do a light scratch just to put a little air back into the soil so that we don't repeat what we saw here last year.
Whether or not that is going to turn out to be an effective strategy, it's hard to tell, especially for the guys who are no-till truthers and they don't want to do any soil disturbance. We need to find better ways to get oxygen in the soil without using tillage. But there are certainly folks out there as well who are using cover crop rye and do use extensive amounts of tillage. There's been certain circumstances where that's turned into disaster as well because we know a thick stand of rye can make some really difficult clumps and create some really uneven seed-beds. My experience has shown that stick to the plan if you're a no-tiller, stick to the plan because ultimately going through and trying to till up a bunch of heavy stand cover crop rye usually leads to more problems than benefits.
Mackane Vogel:
Yeah, great point. All right. Well you alluded to it earlier, but something a little bit more niche but still definitely of interest to our audience, you credit cover crops and soil health for kind of pulling the weight on your sweet corn and your pumpkin operation. I want to give you a chance to talk a little bit about that.
Joe Ailts:
Sure. We run a three acre hobby farm, pretty small scale, but it allows us to do some really neat intensive research with cover crops. Been blessed to find that we can actually move organic matter in a meaningful direction through the use of these types of regenerative practices. When I started farming on this three acres of hobby farm ground, it was 2.5% Organic matter. Not horrible in the grand scheme of things, but we have since been able to bring that 2.5% Up to 4.5% through pretty intensive cover cropping strategies and not a lot of importation of outside carbon to do so. We do manure on an every other year cycle because I like manure as a crop input, but not trying to go overboard with that. That would be the only carbon importation that we've had is every other year manuring.
And so then one has to ask, well, how do you move 2% organic matter if you're not importing that much carbon? And I do believe it comes back to the intensive cover cropping. And so I've divided those three acres into three different parcels and that's how it rotates through the system. The third parcel that hasn't been mentioned here yet is just purely cover crop. We grow an acre of sorghum sedan just to build biomass exclusively. And so I'll plant that sorghum sedan and in somewhere late May, early June when temperatures are fit to do so, and then it gets mowed a few weeks later once it reaches knee-high. And then we continue to mow that all the way through mid-September just to continue to cycle as much carbon and biomass through the systems as we can. Once we get to the end of September there, that sorghum sedan gets terminated and I establish a cover crop rye, which will become next year's pumpkin patch.
And here's where I think the linchpin and the success of this pumpkin crop really exists because I could not grow pumpkins in our environment without the use of that cover crop mat. The cover crop is allowed to grow till usually Memorial Day weekend, in which case then it's rolled and terminated and then we transplant seedlings directly into that cover crop rye mat and that mat is thick. The unique aspect about doing this successfully is making sure that that rye cover crop stand is as thick as you can possibly get it. I have an old 56 McCormick drill, and we put it in at the usual rate of around a bushel and a half to two bushels. But what I do is I set the drill for half rate seeding and I drill in a spiral pattern across that square block and then I come back and I do it again at a diagonal such that my seeds per square inch is as maximally high as it can possibly be.
We're trying to cover every square inch of dirt with a seed, and as a result of that, our rye stands come up really, really nice and thick. And I guess the one anecdote I can share here is that last year we had less than six inches of rain between the time we planted our pumpkins and when we harvested them in September, and that's really light moisture for us. We're usually getting 20 plus inches throughout the growing season. However, despite the fact that we didn't have the water that we had hoped and we don't have irrigation, we harvested our best pumpkin crop ever. It was the cleanest from a weed standpoint, we don't use any herbicides in season growing the pumpkins because the rye does all the heavy lifting there. And of course with that heavy mat, it helped preserve moisture through those hot sunny days when we just weren't getting any rain. Again, to put a bow on that, I could not grow pumpkins without this rye system and then to get the benefit that it's also improving soil health while doing this for the pumpkin crop, it's almost too good to be true, and I wouldn't do it without it. There's just no way that I could possibly do it without the rye.
Mackane Vogel:
Did you start doing this and then take that out into your agronomy work or was it the opposite?
Joe Ailts:
Yeah, that's the neat thing about my hobbies is they line up with the day job and so there's a lot of cross pollination, no pun intended, between what I do in the agronomy world and what we do on the hobby farm. There are certainly practices I've learned on the hobby farm that have been taken to the row croppers and vice versa. I learn a lot every day doing the driving around the fields there. I can bring things back to our farm and figure out how to improve the system we've created there as well. It's a wonderful opportunity. I'm very blessed to have this option to do the agronomy and the hobby farming.
Mackane Vogel:
What's the wildest or maybe the most outside the box idea or encounter you've come into as an agronomist? Anything come to mind?
Joe Ailts:
Sure. I'll start with the hobby farm first because I had the most incredible experience last year that I would love to share with the audience in that historically after we harvest our sweet corn, I've just let the ground sit there fallow. And as someone who is now appreciating more of the importance of always having a living root in the system, I've thought, wow, here's a great opportunity to go out and try something after sweet corn to continue building, right? That's the whole purpose here is we've always got something that we're using to build our soil quality. I went to the garage after the first sweet corn harvest and I loaded up the drill with everything I could find in the garage. It was a blend of oats and I had some soybeans in there, tried some winter camelina, some radishes, and then some sunflowers, and I call it a zoo mix.
I went out there and I punched a zoo mix in after sweet corn harvest, and I tell you what, my mind was blown and what we experienced out there. By October, this zoo mix had grown to be chest height and it was as dense as a jungle and I could not believe the butterflies and the birds and the pollinators that were swarming around this very small segment of post-harvest sweet corn area. It was really truly incredible. Sometime in October, I went out there with an infiltration ring and I did a water infiltration test and this soil had taken in over six inches of rain water in less than three minutes time. It just gobbled that water right up. And this was after we had finally gotten some rains that had replenished our very, very dry soils. This spring, came back out there and observed what was going on where we had this zoo mix.
Almost all that residue is gone, remarkably. The soil is so microbially and biologically active that it had already recycled most of this cover crop residue that was just sitting on the surface. I had not incorporated it. And just a couple mornings ago after a light rain, I walked out into this area and the amount of night crawlers that were on the surface of the soil was really something to behold. It's just amazing what I think you can do to system when you put this really incredible mix of cover crops out there and just let the system do its thing. I'm very excited now to come back and plant into this area where we had this cover crop mix out there. It is some of the best soil tilth that I've ever seen personally.
Mackane Vogel:
Yeah, you'll have to keep us updated on that. That sounds really interesting.
Joe Ailts:
On the agronomy side, I guess an anecdote I can offer there, I work with a number of guys that are fairly progressive in their cover cropping strategies as well. Couple of the most bold things that we've seen that we're excited about is the hairy vetch seeded following small grain harvest, and we've got some pretty robust hairy vetch stands out there this year that I think might offer us a little bit of nitrogen credit. Also work with another guy here who has historically put in some turnips as well as some clovers following his small grain harvest. And wow, to watch this soil come to life and to see the biomass even what should be a winter tilth, at least for the turnips out there, a lot of life coming back in these soils with these different types of cover crop blends.
Mackane Vogel:
Yeah, it's really good stuff. Well, Joe, is there anything else you want to talk about before we go here?
Joe Ailts:
I think that covers all the bases. I have just thrilled to be on and share this information with the audience. There's a lot of neat things happening in the cover crop world right now.
Mackane Vogel:
Sure. I'll give you one more question. I always like to close on this one. Obviously Cover Crop Strategies Podcast, so sometimes it's like preach into the choir, but I like to think that maybe some of these guys pass this show onto some of their more skeptical neighbors and such. What would be your message to maybe the skeptical farmer that's just not quite sure regenerative ag and cover crops and no-till are the right choice for him?
Joe Ailts:
Sure. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And when we say nothing ventured, that doesn't mean you need to go whole hog. I give my advice for anybody who looks at this and goes, well, I wonder if there's a grain of truth to some of this regenerative stuff. Pick five or 10 acres on the backside of a field where the neighbors can't tease you about it. Punch something in and just give it a try. It's very low risk, potentially very high reward because in all the guys that I work with that are doing cover crops now, none of them have decided to hang it up and go back. And I think that's a really important piece that is shared amongst other agronomists out there who are saying the same things. When you make this transition and you see the benefits for yourself, very few, if any, have decided, nope, this isn't for me. I'm going back to the old ways of doing things.
Mackane Vogel:
That's all for this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast. Thanks to Joe Ailts for that great discussion. The full transcript of this episode, as well as our archive of previous podcast episodes, are available at covercropstrategies.com/podcasts. Many thanks to our sponsor, GS3 Quality Seed for helping to make this cover crop podcast series possible. From all of us here at Cover Crop Strategies, I'm Mackane Vogel. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
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