Maximizing Benefits from Cover Crops

00:00 Hey everybody. This is Temple Roof from Extreme Ag. It seems like it's a fairly hot topic around, um, everybody kind of talks about cover crops 00:07 and what, what it can do for their soil and so on and so forth. So we've been planting cover crops in this area for, 00:15 you know, it's been an incentive program that the government came up for our area for probably 25 to maybe almost 30 years. 00:24 We've had multiple different ones. We've done tillage radish and wheat rod barley, we've done brass in there with it. 00:30 CLN vetch. We've done just about everything. We've tried 'em all. Everybody seems to think that, hey, look, it's, it improves soil, it does this and that. 00:38 They're not wrong. It does. But after the last, I'll go back to like 15 years, up until three 00:44 or four years ago, we started, we never saw a dramatic difference. Like we didn't improve CECs, 00:51 we didn't improve our organic matter. And I know that a lot of people say that, that you can dramatically improve CECs, 00:58 you can dramatically improve, um, organic matter. And I'm not saying that you can, you can, but that takes time like a lot, a lot, a lot 01:06 of time you're not gonna see big differences. Where we've seen big differences is when we added the cover crop and putting 01:14 multiple different species on there, and then we follow it up with whether it's stalk digesters or whatever, humic and Vics. 01:22 And we started blending all these different things together. We started to see differences of where in our soil samples. 01:29 And the past three years, we've kind of ramped it up, where before we weren't seeing a ramp up. 01:35 Like we've seen minor, minor changes, but the dramatic changes came when we started adding all this other, this different approach. 01:43 You know, it's more of that systematic approach. So when you talk about cover crops, been doing it for 30 years, have we seen big differences? 01:53 Not really, but where we've seen differences, it's, it's, it's been a big help where we can get nutrients back out 01:59 of the soil, put it back into the soil, get it into our next crop. I think our crops are better, 02:04 but have we dramatically improved CECs and organic matter? Not really. Um, where we saw that improvement 02:11 is when we started using system Mac approach and we started using all these different things, IC sugars, um, stalk digesters, and adding all those things together. 02:20 When we started doing that, that's where dramatic differences can be made. So if you guys are thinking about a cover crop program, 02:27 think about a systematic approach. Don't think that cover crops are gonna do it alone, but you can do it when you use a a different approach. 02:36 See you guys soon.