Mackane Vogel here with this week’s cover crop connection. I’m here at the Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance’s 20th Anniversary celebration on Jim Hershey’s farm, having a field day in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. As you can see we’ve had lots of equipment on display, lots of demos so far and lots of great speakers too. So, we’ve got a great Cover Crop Connection in store for you and we’re going to toss it off to that segment right now.

“This is my MaizePro. It’s planted a little out of season right now. We like to plant this in the last half of August, because it likes the cooler weather. This sort of sets the table. So if you’re going to have Sunday dinner and you’re going to have friends over after church, it could very well be that you’re going to have the table set before you leave for church. Or if not, you’re leaving home really early and you’re getting it all laid out. You get the silverware, the glasses, the napkins all set out. That’s what MaizePro is trying to do for corn. Corn is your guest. MaizePro is setting the table for your guest — for a banquet. There’s 10 different species in here. About half of them will winterkill, so we plant in August. Things like Sorghum Sudan will winterkill, the flax will winterkill, some of your clovers, your vetches and your winter rye will stay. So, it’s a feeding program. I talked over there about how important it is to feed the microbes. With this here we are feeding through living roots and then we are also feeding the soil as the things expire and then we can either plant green or terminate it.”

Alright and as I mentioned before, there has been just a plethora of great cover crop content on the farm today, so stay tuned in the coming weeks for lots more from this event and be sure to go check out the podcast with Jim Hershey at Cover Crop Strategies dot com as well.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.