Weeds AR Wild, Episode 26 Title: Cover Crops: Planting, Expectations, and Weed Control T. Butts, M. Fryer, and T. Roberts Date: October 4, 2021 Welcome to the Weeds AR Wild podcast series as a part of Arkansas Row Crops Radio. Arkansas Row Crops Radio, providing up-to-date information and timely recommendations on row crop production in Arkansas. Welcome to the Weeds AR Wild podcast series as a part of Arkansas Row Crops Radio. My name is Tommy Butts, extension weed scientist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Thank you for joining us for this next episode of the Weeds AR Wild podcast series. Today we’re going to be discussing cover crops, especially as we’re getting into the heat of the planting season for those as we’re in harvest season and we’re taking off our crops, we need to be moving right into planting these cover crops, so we kind of wanted to have a conversation today about just anything and everything dealing with planting and species selection, expectations and then how that all plays in the weed control at the end. Now before I jump into introducing my fellow co-hosts today and getting into that conversation, I do want to put in a plug for our Division of Agriculture Field Days. Virtual Field Days upcoming here, so on October 7th at 6 p.m. we are having our Rice and Soybean Virtual Field Day. If you want more information on that, it’s available at our Arkansas Agriculture Experiment Station website or bit.ly/ricesoybean21. Also coming up on October 28th at 6 p.m. is the Corn and Cotton Virtual Field Day. So please mark your calendars for those dates and join us for those virtual field days. There’s been a lot of work in the background putting the videos together and our communications group getting us all outlined and ready and so we’d love to have you join and gather some more information from us in a virtual setting. So again, October 7th here at 6 p.m.is the Rice and Soybean Virtual Field Day and October 28th at 6 p.m. will be the Corn and Cotton Field Day. So please join us for those. Now moving out of that and jumping into the conversation today, I’ve got 2 co-hosts today. First of all Matt Fryer, extension soil instructor with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Matt, you want to say hi and give a quick background on yourself? Matt: Sure, thanks for having me Tommy. I’m glad to be here. I work with county agents and any on-farm demonstrations with anything related to soil. So that’s cover crops or fertility related, that’s what I do. So, just glad to be on here. Tommy: Perfect, thank you. And the next co-host is Dr. Trent Roberts who is the recently new endowed chair in soil fertility research. Trent, thanks for joining today. You want to introduce yourself or say hi or not scare away our listeners today, that would be the best thing thank you. Trent: Well thanks Tommy, I appreciate it. I just, I’m glad you invited us on today. Hopefully some of the information that Matt & I can provide everyone will get them interested in cover crops and if they’re not already doing it, hopefully push them in that direction to at least dip their toe in the water and give them a chance. Tommy: Perfect. I like that sentiment. And especially if you’re going to be new to cover crops. I think dipping your toe in is an excellent analogy right off the bat. You know it’s something you want to try but don’t go full sail in because that’s just asking for trouble right off the bat, so I like that starting off our conversation. One of the first things that I just wanted to throw out to you all here to start off this conversation is really, since we’re moving into this planting window for cover crops, what are some planting details that we need to pay attention to and specifically, especially for someone new, what kind of species selection should we be going for, what should we be paying attention to moving forward into next years’ cash crop, all those kinds of things? And so I guess first off, let’s start off with you Trent, just go right back to you, what’s one of the first couple of things you would gear someone towards when they start considering planting their cover crops this fall? Trent: Well to me the hard part to really grasp your head around or think about with cover crops is when we plant a cash crop, we’re thinking about making money, right? So I’m going to plant soybean in this field because I’m going to make this amount of money. I’m going to plant rice instead of soybean because my profit potential is greater. And what’s difficult about cover crops is we’re not harvesting those crops, right? And so we’re trying to realize benefits that may or may not have a monetary value. And that becomes a little bit difficult because what I think we have to do with cover crops is think, ok, potentially what can I do with this cover crop to save money, right? So when we think about where we see the biggest benefit from cover crop implementation, a lot of times it’s in non-irrigated systems. Well the majority of our crops are irrigated, so the first thing I try to tell people is, in an irrigated production system where we have high inputs, we can’t expect these huge yield increases that we see in other parts of the country. And so I think our focus needs to be on, ok, how can I implement cover crops to help reduce my input cost? And we just think about going no-till. Well if you go no-till and implement cover crops, that’s a huge savings and fuel labor equipment depreciation. You now all those different types of things. So I would start by saying that. And then I would turn it over to Matt because I think Matt does a really good job of talking about goal-oriented cover crops and let him kind of talk about that. Matt: Yeah, I like what you said Trent and I think every time I work with producers on cover crop selection, that is the first question I ask, is what are your goals that you want to achieve with a cover crop? Is it reducing weed pressure in your following cash crop? Is it improve water infiltration? We have irrigated systems, but sometimes we don’t have water soaking in past 6 inches. And so do you want to kind of open up that soil profile a little bit, allow water to go in deeper while your cash crop roots to potentially grow deeper and take up nutrients beyond 6 inches of soil? And so that’s my first question. If it’s weed control, if its erosion, reducing erosion, if it’s to improve water infiltration. Grasses are going to be the work horse of the cover crop species for a lot of goals that we have in Arkansas. On the same hand with a cash crop that you’re following that cover crop with is important because we don’t want to follow a 100% grass cover crop with a grass cash crop, like corn. We want to throw in some legumes in there, have a legume dominated cover crop ahead of corn or rice. And so those are the two main questions I would ask. And then the next question I would ask is, planting date, when are you planting, do you think you’ll be able to get planted before mid-October? And that opens up kind of your options for species selection. If you are going to be planting past mid-October, that kind of throws out the brassicas, there’s really no point in planting those after mid-October. They just don’t put on enough growth. They typically winter kill and so planting date plays a big role as well. And then the third question I would ask is how are you going to plant? For drilling the cover crop seed, and again your window on selection is wide but if your broadcasting without incorporating that seed somehow, I mean really oats and in a lot of cases Austrian winter pea is such a large seed, always shy away from that unless you’re getting in really early to plant and ahead of a lot of rain. Tommy: Yeah so that was going to be one of my big things too which is kind of a foolish thing to talk about, the rain and moisture factor, when it’s been raining all day down state here, at least today. I actually almost got stuck in a field this morning going to look at it, so there’s a pretty significant amount of moisture out there right now trying to plant. But for our grasses and for all our cover crops really, Winter pea, I mean we really need to make sure that we do have that moisture. Is there a specific timeline? I mean is it like our other crops with cover crops too, that if we have rainfall within a week or so we’re in pretty good shape, but if we start getting longer and longer, we’re going to expect poorer and poorer stands? I mean is it, it follows through the same basically for our cover crops as any of our other crops, correct? Matt; I would think so. Trent what are your thoughts on that? Trent: Yeah, I would say that is generally true but one thing that has always amazed me Tommy is we’ll plant some of this stuff the first of September in some of our planting date studies and that stuff will sit there for a month and not do anything and then if you get an inch of rain the first of October you’ll get a beautiful stand. And so it will surprise you sometimes. I think as long as you’re drilling or planting the cover crop seed and you’re getting it covered, you’re generally going to get pretty good results. Where you have to worry is if you’re broadcasting it and not covering or incorporating it, or you know some people try to fly on their cover crop seed in the standing beans. To me that’s when it gets really risky. You know just to follow up on some things Matt said there, you know, biomass is the name of the game with cover crops. I don’t care what you’re trying to do, biomass production is the key. And getting the correct species selected, by getting it planted on time and getting a good stand are all steps, right, that are going to help you achieve a lot of biomass and hopefully a lot of goals, but to me it’s one of those situations where if you’re going to do it, take the time to do it right. I mean, you’re spending money on this, you’re spending time on it, so I mean treat it like a cash crop. If you’re buying the seed and you’re going to take the time to do it, every little thing you can do to get it off on the right step is going to be greatly beneficial and you’ll be able to realize the benefits down the road. Tommy: Yeah, that’s one of the things I was talking about on the weed control front too, is do some of those little things right and they add up. If you do a lot of little things wrong and that adds up too and you end up with a bad situation. So you got to kind of focus and do some of those little things and even though it’s time consuming and other things, it’s going to go a long way to make it a better situation for yourself. So I agree with that 100%. As far as the optimum planting window, I know you talked a lot about mid-October but you can plant as early as September, those kinds of things. With some of our most common species that are used out there, which I’m thinking like you mentioned the grasses, whether that’s cereal rye or wheat or those kinds of things. Or probably Austrian winter pea is probably pretty common. I’ve had a few calls on that. When is the optimal window, really when would be your drop dead date, that you do not want to plant any of those any later? Trent: Well so we’ve got some information out there on that and what I’ve tried to tell people to do is we can really just look at our wheat production manual and kind of use it to really mimic when and where we can apply wheat, so for instance our wheat quick facts just came out that has some of that optimal planting window and I think for our winter cereals and winter legumes, those rules of thumb for like the north part of the state, the central part of the state and the south are going to hold true for our cover crops. But especially for our winter cereals and our winter legumes, you can plant some of this stuff all the way up into November and if the conditions are right you can get a good stand, you may not get a whole lot of ground cover and erosion prevention in the winter. Tommy: It goes back to the biomass factor though right? It’s, you can plant that late but you’re not necessarily building much biomass as you need. It may work depending on what environmental conditions we got, but the longer you delay it like that, again you’re not building that biomass factor, correct, even though you have potential good stand and things like that? Trent: The nice thing about it is though is when it breaks dormancy in the spring, then you’re going to get your biomass, right? So early planting in the fall gives you more winter protection but really as long as you can get it to establish, especially our winter cereals and our winter legumes, you know once we hit February and it starts warming up then we’re going to get all that biomass. Matt eluded to this earlier but the problem with our mustards and other brassicas, all their biomass is put on in the fall and so if you don’t plant early you’re just wasting your time. Tommy: Awesome. One of the other things I think we need to talk about here too right off the bat when we’re in this planting species selection discussion is to factor in the termination aspect next spring. I think that’s a big thing. At least when I’ve talked to guys, well when we planted these they said it would be a good cover crop, but now how do we kill it? And really that should be one of the first conversations had too as a goal, right? Is how, what are we looking to plant as far as cash crop and how are we going to kill this cover crop to make sure that it doesn’t mess with our cash crop? And so there’s a lot of different options when it comes to, especially when we’re talking about grasses vs broadleafs vs legumes, and all those kinds of things. So one of the first things that I always like to point people to is in our MP44 the recommended chemicals for weed and brush control publication, in our burn down table up front we do have some recommendations and guidelines as far as burning down with herbicides some of those crops in the spring. They are kind of on the right side of that table, so there is at least a couple of recommendations out there to try and kill things like cereal rye, the winter pea, that kind of stuff. Now if you get into other mixes of cover crop species or other species that aren’t in that table, you got to try and play the game of what might it be most similar to on that table and will it work best because we really don’t have a lot of data necessarily especially if we’re trying to kill early in the spring or trying to plant early some of our cash crops and kill some of these covers a little earlier. You know a lot of our recommendations might change based on temperature and things like that and so, you got to play some games there but at least that’s a starting point to really try and terminate some of these cover crops then. Matt, Trent, do either one of you have anything to add on the termination front side of things? Trent: The only thing I would say Tommy and you may need to put a disclaimer in here but my go to especially with blends is essentially a mix of Paraquat and a photosystem II inhibiting herbicide. And for different crops that may be different herbicides but generally that mix is going to do a good job of terminating a wide array of different species and it also gives you a little bit of residual weed control depending on which one of those photosystem II herbicides you choose. And like I said, that’s your realm of expertise but that would be my only comment. Tommy: And that’s a great option. I’m 100% there with you and some of those caveats start coming into play though too, are we trying to get away with a one shot termination kill, are we trying to do sequentials to kill it? That Gramoxone/Paraquat plus a PS2, I always like to throw that out there basically right at planting because you roll that residual right into whatever cash crop you’re planting. Well you know you’ve got a big stand of cereal rye, might be pretty tough to kill with one shot of Gramoxone, so you almost need to have an earlier shot, maybe a week or two weeks in advance and then you finish it off at planting and that’s why I like to throw in that PS2 right at planting to roll it into your residuals, so that’s a good point, it’s a great program but like you said there’s just all those extra little caveats when you start talking about the different species and everything else. And really honestly that’s probably a good point to mention just right now up front on this conversation is any of these conversations that we’ve had with cover crops is not a one size fits all approach. There’s multiple things, multiple ways to do all of these and really you need to find what works best for your operation but what we’re going to be talking about today is these guidelines that we’ve seen work through some research and can get you going down on a right path but it’s not necessarily the end all be all way to do things. You got to kind of, with cover crops you got to find some little ways that work better for your operation specifically, but this at least is a main interstate, you got to find the right exit ramps to get you the rest of the way. So with that is there anything else on the planting window side of things that you guys wanted to cover or should we just jump into some of the expectations and what to expect maybe after we get some of these cover crops in the ground? Trent: The last thing I’ll say is if you’re using a legume make sure the seed is inoculated. I find more often than not that’s a big swing and a miss that people assume that they’ve been growing soybeans there and they can put out vetch or winter pea or something else but it’s just going to nodulate and do it’s thing but whether you’re doing clovers or any of the other winter legumes, make sure it’s inoculated when you plant it. Tommy: Awesome Matt. You got something to add? Matt: Yeah and I may be getting into what we are going to discuss here shortly but I always advise folks and caution people never to plant cereal rye ahead of corn or rice. We just got too much data that says you’re likely to see a yield drag in your corn if you’ve got cereal rye even if you terminated early, so I would just give that as a word of caution. Tommy: Awesome. I think that’s, like you said, that’s a great conversation to have as some of those selections and what we’re going into for the next cash crop and actually that, I might as well just roll into it because that does play into a little bit on the allelopathy side of things. As far as expectations that’s one of the things that always gets thrown out to us is, well the cover crops are suppose to secrete chemicals, right, to help us with weed control? I always have to take a politicians answer here and say well it depends, right? It might be, it might not be. And it depends on what cash crop we’re going to, it depends on what weeds you are trying to go after and what species you’re planting as a cover crop. I did do a little bit of background work though just to pull up a couple of studies before this podcast so I wanted to throw out a couple of things at least here that I found. And really on the allelopathy thing with cover crops, there’s the good and there’s the bad. So again, there’s good and bad to this. On the good side, I found a USDA NRCS fact sheet that came out of Missouri talking about allelopathy and cover crops and they had some research that they sited that shown cereal rye that we talked about that is very common across the state, has shown to be really quite allelopathic to certain small seeded summer annuals so things like pigweed, lambsquarter, which we don’t have a huge problem with in the state of Arkansas, but it’s a weed that it works good on, purslane and even crabgrass to some extent it’s shown some good allelopathic activity on. But then if you start talking about some larger seeded broadleaves, the allelopathic effect hasn’t been as strong, so things like ragweed, sicklepod and morningglories, there really wasn’t much of an effect from it on the allelopathic side of things. There was also some discussion there about how some of the sorghums, so if you had like a sorghum sudan grass or something else along those lines, that’s been shown to actually suppress bermudagrass pretty well and some yellow nutsedge, which anymore we have a lot of yellow nutsedge problems across the state so we may have to do some weed science research on some of the sorghums to see how that’s helping on that front. So there is some good news there on the allelopathic front. There’s also some bad news. So another study, this actually came out of Tennessee, I’m going to pronounce the name wrong, but it’s Shakoofa et al 2020 looked at allelopathic cover crops on cotton germination and seedling growth. So on the bad side of things, with some of these different cover crops we’re going to impact our growth and germination of our cash crop. So what they showed was, they had planted winter pea, hairy vetch, oats, annual ryegrass, which side note, do not plant annual ryegrass as a cover crop here in Arkansas. I’m just going to tell you right now, do not do that. Italian ryegrass, annual ryegrass is one of the most herbicide resistant weeds in the state. Please do not do that. So that was a side note. But annual ryegrass and winter wheat. So those five different cover crop species. And in this study they had allelopathic impacts on their cotton from all five of those species. Which I was surprised about from the wheat part, that there was still allelopathic effects there too. Now winter pea was the worst going into cotton that caused the most allelopathic action against cotton and they also showed as a part of that basically timing of termination impacted that allelopathic effect. If they terminated sooner, so up to six weeks before, they saw less of an effect, if they terminated right at planting, obviously there was a greater impact on that cotton growth. It was both root growth and germination, so it affected both. So there is some problems there just into our cash crop as well where we need to select our species appropriately. Some of those grasses again would be a little bit better heading into cotton vs something like a winter pea might mess with our cotton pretty good. But the final thing that I wanted to mention with all of this allelopathy side of things is, it is highly, highly variable what to expect from that. There is really nothing that we can say from a weed science extension perspective on what to expect with this, because it can depend on the different interactions, the different species, what stage those species are at. Certain species emit these allelopathic chemicals in vegetative stages, some are when they go into reproductive stages, that can change things. Environmental things, soil moisture, temperature, all that kind of stuff. All this is going to impact how much of an effect we see. Again, good or bad. And so I just wanted to throw all that out there. There can be some good effects, there can be some bad effects. So it may be something that can help us but we need to be aware of that and we need to watch out what cash crop we’re going into again appropriately selecting those, but then also just being aware that it’s hit or miss when it comes to that. The real benefit when it comes to the weed control side of these cover crops is the ground cover aspect and making sure that we shade the ground and we don’t let things germinate. The allelopathy part of that is an extra added plus if it happens to be there. But the bigger thing is shading the ground and covering it and not letting stuff germinate up through there because it can’t get sunlight. That’s really the bigger component to cover crops and so it all goes back to that original conversation like Trent mentioned was biomass. Get that biomass, get the ground shaded, that’s what’s going to be the bigger deal for us on the weed control front than the allelopathic side of things, even though there may be some added benefit there, it’s not the sole benefit. So that was a long-winded response there on allelopathy, but I wanted to get through some of that stuff. Matt, I know you talked about his, looked at it a little bit. Did you have anything to add on that front or other things that you’ve kind of heard or seen along the way? Matt: Other than yield drags in corn I haven’t seen any major what I thought might be allelopathic issues, but as far as benefits I’ve seen reduced pigweed, germination of some of our cover crop demonstrations in the Delta where we can save an application of Liberty or reduce inputs that way with a cover crop, grass cover crop. That’s about all I’ve seen on those. Guess I’d say also that, again like you said, these cover crops are going to help with weed control but they are not a silver bullet. They are just another tool in our arsenal against our problem weeds. Tommy: And on the corn, like you mentioned, I mean that came from some Arkansas research too that you’ve seen first hand, right? I think I heard you mention at one point it was like twenty bushel to the acre difference effect, right, when you planted cereal rye and tried to plant corn into it, am I remembering that correctly? Matt: Well, so Dr. Jason Kelley’s got replicated research, where he had heavy rate of cereal rye, solid cereal rye terminated at different dates, some eight weeks before, I think four weeks, and planted green. The planted green was a forty or fifty bushel yield drag and then the eight weeks was similar to the fallow. Tommy: Ok. That’s crazy. That’s a huge reduction, huge impact when you’re talking corn yields and prices and everything else. So I guess moving on from the allelopathy side of things like I mentioned it’s something to be aware of but a kind of smaller aspect. A couple of the other expectations I wanted to hit on really land more in your guys’ realm compared to my weed control realm but and I don’t care who wants to start any of this, but could you guys just maybe hit on a couple of the other things as far as expectations go, with again improving the soil and then improving maybe organic matter or maybe reducing, again I’m just going to throw this stuff out there because I know all of these conversations are had, but reducing potential nutrient inputs in the future, things like that right? We all hear these conversations, can you hit on a few of these topics, as far, and especially maybe with like let’s say a legume vs a grass crop, right? And what we could expect on these different avenues as far as soil, texture improvement, aeriation, infiltration and then organic matter and nutrient inputs kind of thing in the future. So I don’t know who wants to start on that whole realm of things but I thought I’d throw those out to both of you. Trent: Well I think if we start and look at the nutrient aspect of it, we have to understand that these cover crops are growing and taking up nutrients, right, just like a cash crop would. If it’s a legume cover crop then it could be right generating nitrogen similar to a soybean with biological nitrogen fixation but one thing that I think we all need to be aware of is we all need to go back to an intro to chemistry and talk about the laws of thermo-dynamics, right? Tommy: Who said that? That was not in this brochure, that we discussed. Nah, I’m just kidding. Trent: I thought that was a pre-rec for this podcast. You know we can’t just generate nutrients out of thin air, right? And so when we grow these cover crops you know the legumes can fix nitrogen and add nitrogen to the soil but when you start seeing varying responses to P&K and some of these others, you know those cover crops aren’t, it’s not alchemy, right, if they’re not making potash just out of thin air, a lot of times what we’re doing is we’re redistributing those nutrients within the soil profile, right? And so we’re potentially mining potash and phosphorus from lower soil ducts and we’re bringing them up more into the root zones of our cash crops and that can be very beneficial but to me the long story short is if you produce a bushel of grain those nutrients have to come from somewhere and so if the cover crops are mining them out of the soil and making them plant available, you know at some point you’re going to have to replace those. And so cover crops are definitely not going to be a be all end all in terms of solving fertility inputs or eliminating fertility inputs but they can help us take better advantage of the nutrients that we have in the profile. I’ll let Matt kind of talk about some of the soil organic matter and soil health aspects of it but if any of this stuff that we do, it’s a long game, right? So it’s just like when people convert to no-till, you’re going to have a rough three or four years there where you’re trying to figure stuff out and once you get things figured out, and the system kind of balances back out and you start to see all these benefits and I think that’s a message that I would want people to take home today is it may take you three or four or five years before you start to see a lot of these benefits, but you got to stick with it. And I’ll let Matt talk about some of the soil health and organic matter aspects. Matt; Yeah, I would agree with everything you said there. When we talk about soils we also are talking about the cash crop roots being able to go deep, right? And so I think especially grasses as a cover crop are going to help our cash crop roots go deeper than if we did not have a cover crop in place. And so I think probably the most visible place we see this is probably in cotton right now where we have some symptoms that we see, we have an optimal soil test potassium levels but then in the heat of the season when boll load is heavy, high nutrient demand in the crop, we see potassium deficiency even though we’ve put out recommended potassium pre-season or we have optimal levels in the soil and I think a lot of that is because the cotton plant is just restricted the rooting depth is restricted to our hardpan that we have and water’s not going past 6 inches so why do roots need to go past 6 inches? If water’s not going past that then if there are any roots below that then they aren’t taking up nutrients because that’s how most of our nutrients are taken up is via water so I think that is a big benefit as far as the fertility aspect but again yet cover crops are not magically adding P&K so you can’t eliminate that. Some other things that I’ve, some kind of outlandish claims is, you know I’ve doubled my organic matter in one or two years with cover crops and you know in the south we have warm winters, we have a lot of rainfall, it doesn’t get cold enough to stop soil microbes from breaking down organic matter and so organic matter increases in Arkansas is going to be extremely slow. We’ve got some four and five year cover crop studies where we’ve seen sixteenth one hundredths so point one six (0.16) percent organic matter increases in four years. So I think we can build it, it’s going to be really slow, but I think one thing’s for sure is that we cannot build organic matter without cover crops, even in no-till and heavy biomass cash crop like rice and soybean rotations. We can’t build organic matter without cover crops. So you know the thing for me, cover crops all have great benefits and soil health practices have great benefits and really it’s implementing all the principles we’ve learned and intro to soils and principles of weed control. It’s implementing all these best management practices on a large scale but I think where we go wrong is where we take these benefits out of context. And so putting these benefits that we expect to see in context will make us all better utilize these practices long term and not get discouraged with them. Tommy: Yeah I think that’s an excellent point and just to kind of piggy back off of that and go to the weed control part of cover crops, I mean it fits perfectly right? Cover crops are not going to be an end all be all to fix our weed control problems in the field, but if we don’t use them, we see absolutely no benefit, right? If you don’t have something, if you’re not trying something, if you’re not using something, then there is no chance of it helping, whereas if we try it, we use it, we can see some kind of benefit out of it so that’s important. Especially moving into the realm of how much herbicide resistance we have out there, we’ve got to start looking at other options outside of herbicides and using multiple tools instead of trying to rely on just one single tool to do this and I think cover crops are a big piece of that puzzle. I mean just for example just to kind of hit on points we already talked about how especially things like cereal rye can have some really good activity on our Palmer Amaranth populations and reduce, especially the first initial flushes in the spring, reduce that Palmer population that we have to deal with later in the season. We also with these cover crops that may aid in some aspects of weed seed predation, right? By having a living crop or living plant out there can attract more birds, more insects, things like that to eat some of those weed seeds and destroy them. Now that could be good or bad because some research out of Missouri has shown how ducks transport Palmer Amaranth seed a long distance, so then it kind of depends on our weed populations and things like that, but again another option to potentially eliminate some weed seeds. And again, it may or may not help us with some of our bad Italian ryegrass problems we have out there. Now it’s definitely not an answer for ryegrass by any means, I mean ryegrass grows with our wheat crop every year and like Trent said with a lot of this stuff we can consider it kind of compared to wheat so it’s not going to be a major fix for there but anytime we can compete with that ryegrass some more, it’s going to help us at least hopefully reduce some seed production on it and if we can implement some of our other strategies too, if our cover crop will get up and we still apply maybe a fall residual herbicide that we were planning on anyway without a cover crop, it can help with our ryegrass and then we have the cover crop for the spring to eliminate spring flushes or our next summer annuals and things like that. So again, it’s not going to help us a lot with our ryegrass, but anytime we can compete with that more and have something out there where it’s not just growing by itself it will go a long ways. And then one of the final things I wanted to mention on the weed control front, because we get a lot of questions about it, is in the spring we have that much biomass and covering the ground and everything else, do we need to spray our pre-emergence residual herbicides? And the answer is a resounding yes. You still want to get those pre-emergence herbicides out, they will still help us a long ways and again they will reduce selection pressure for POST herbicides later in the season. Now even with our PRE’s, we’ve got to have moisture to activate them and so even if they would get caught up on residue early, if we’re getting the appropriate moisture to get those activated, that’s going to flush them back down into the soil still, even if it got caught on that residue and we’re going to have activation, it’s going to give us control, so those are still really important to use as well, don’t cut those out of the program just because we’ve used a cover crop. The cover crop will just help eliminate some of the flushes we have to deal with and help reduce selection pressure for resistance which is always a great thing moving forward as well. With that, those are the main things I kind of wanted to hit on the weed control front. Before we kind of log off here, I’ll start, Matt, is there anything final you wanted to hit on with cover crops, weed control, planting, anything as we’re getting into the heat of the season I guess? Even though it’s fall, it’s not suppose to be heat but heat of the season for cover crops. Matt: Yeah, I guess I’ll go back to kind of cover crop selection. Trent and I both were kind of vague and there’s a reason like you said, there’s no cookie cutter answer so I can’t really be specific but again based on your goals and your cash crop following your cover crop, so I just always go by the rule of thumb, and Trent you may have a different opinion but if your cash crop is going to be a grass cash crop like corn or rice, you don’t want anymore than about twenty five percent of your cover crop mix to be a grass regardless of your goals. You want seventy five percent of that to be either legume or brassica and vice versa for a legume cash crop. You only want about twenty five percent or less of that cover crop to be a legume. And so that’s just kind of a rule of thumb that I follow on my recommendations. The next thing I would say on, I mentioned organic matter, it’s really slow but I think even smaller organic matter increases can give us pretty big benefits as far as moisture retention and water infiltration and so small increases don’t necessarily mean small benefits. Tommy: Trent do you have anything to add as far as final comments? Trent: The only thing I would add is you know I think Tommy, you as well as Matt and myself have all emphasized this idea of easing into cover crops, and so I would just encourage everyone to reach out to NRCS and they’ve got a lot of good programs that I kind of think of as starter programs, right? So they can help facilitate the funding for you to get started in cover crops, and so I would encourage you to reach out to those local resources and they can provide some funding to help with seed purchase, termination, several different things, but it’s not anything you want to jump into with both feet. Work through the process, figure out what works for you and just remember that every field, every situation is going to be a little bit different and what works for your neighbor might not work for you but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a try. And as always Matt, myself, all of us, we don’t have all the answers but we’re going to try our best to help get you the information that you need. Tommy: Yeah and just along those lines, you know outside of this podcast there’s several other resources available for you to go and get more cover crop information if you want it. Trent actually has a couple of really great fact sheets available on our website. One is Understanding Cover Crops, the second one is Austrian Winter pea as a Cover Crop, so those are a couple of great options to check out. Like I mentioned before in our MP44 we have some information as far as termination of some of those cover crops and some recommendations there. Matt actually has a couple of great videos out on Youtube discussing cover crop seed selection as well as termination in cotton, so one’s on Youtube and I guess one is on Plant Health Exchange (PlantHealthExchange.org) I should say. So one’s Youtube and one’s Plant Health Exchange. And then also the Take Action Group sponsored by the United Soybean Board has a whole fact sheet series of revolving around cover crops for weed management and so those are available on www.iwilltakeaction.com so please visit those and support the Take Action Group as well for the weed management side of cover crops. Matt, what else did you want to add there? Matt: I just want to put in a plug for the Arkansas Soil Health Alliance, so we have a group of farmers that have organized a non-profit called the Arkansas Soil Health Alliance and they’ve been using cover crops for quite some time and they have a lot of experience on large scale implementation that we don’t, and we can get you connected with them and some farmer to farmer education. Sometimes more valuable than anything we can offer, so just put in a plug for them. Tommy: That’s awesome, I appreciate that. So just as we wrap up here, last couple of things I wanted to mention is just kind of thank yous to everybody. So we’ve had a good year long Weeds AR Wild podcast series here and I just wanted to mention a lot of thank yous to all our guests, so thank you Matt, thank you Trent for joining us today for this series. I also just wanted to thank our promotion boards for their funding throughout the year. Without a lot of that funding we wouldn’t be able to do Extension events, or Extension activity things like this as well as our research opportunities where we talk about all of these recommendations. They’re all science supported, they’re all from research that we’ve conducted or fellow extension specialists have conducted and that’s because of the support we get from some of those different commodity boards across the state, so we thank all of them for their support as well as the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture for their help and assistance and support as well along the way. So a big thank you there. And as always thank you to the listener for continuing to support us and follow these podcasts even when we have guests on like Trent Roberts. It’s great that you continue to listen through these, so I appreciate all of that. But with that any final last comments Matt, Trent? Awesome. Matt: Thanks for having us on. Trent: Yep, thanks for having us. Everybody have a good safe weekend. Tommy: Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us and once again thanks for joining us for this episode of the Weeds AR Wild podcast series on Arkansas Row Crops Radio. Arkansas Row Crops Radio is a production of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. For more information, please contact your local county extension agent or visit uaex.uada.edu.