Growing Biologically Rich Seeds

Keith Berns of Green Cover Seeds discusses hybrid cover crops, seed-microbe interactions, crop insurance and cover crops, the nutrient-chelating effects of glyphosate, and more

Acres U.S.A. You’re practicing what you preach as we’re recording here — looks like you’re in the tractor seeding some cover crops.

Keith Berns. Yeah, I’m trying to finish up drilling some rye, planting into corn stalks. I’m planting hybrid cereal rye that we’re going to try to grow for seed production. We’ve got a license through KWS to grow their hybrid rye and then sell that second-generation into the cover crop market. They’re trying to be a disruptor in the market because hybrid rye will yield up to twice as much as regular rye. That’s going to be a big deal for the supply of rye. They’re really pushing on it as a livestock feed. They’ve done a lot of research on using rye in hog and cattle rations, but now they’re making a push into the cover crop seed market as well. We’re fairly new with the hybrid stuff and are trying to get a feel for it.

Acres U.S.A. It yields twice as much in terms of just the grain, or also in terms of biomass?

Berns. Mostly grain. In terms of biomass, it’s probably a little shorter than open-pollinated rye. From a standability standpoint, that’s good. It doesn’t lodge as bad, especially since it can make 80 to a hundred bushels per acre. It’s definitely taller than wheat but not as tall as an open-pollinated Elbon or Hazlet rye or something like that.

Acres U.S.A. How many of different cover crops have hybrids these days?

Berns. Well, rye is coming on. There is a hybrid triticale on the market, but it doesn’t have significant advantages over the open pollinated, so we’re not really looking at that. The biggest place where you would see hybrids would be in the warm-season grains or warm-season grasses — like hybrid pearl millet. And almost all of your sorghums are going to be hybrids.

Beyond that, there’s a lot of the brassicas that are crosses. It might be a rape seed cross with kale, but it’s like triticale when they crossed rye and wheat — it becomes a stable platform, so you aren’t having to do male-female crosses every year like you do in seed corn or even like this rye. It’s a true male-female cross every year to get your hybrid seed, and then with everything that comes after that, you start having performance fall off because it doesn’t breed back true, like triticale would. Or the hybrid brassicas — once you get those stable, they’ll breed back true every year, and you can just continue to grow them for seed production every year. You don’t have to redo the crosses.

Acres U.S.A. How many acres of your own are you growing cover crop seed on?

Berns. We farm about 1,700 acres here in southcentral Nebraska, and what we devote to cover crop seed production varies from year to year. It’s a fairly small percentage of the total. There are only certain things that are really well adapted to our environment, the equipment we have, and the labor we have to put toward it. It probably varies between 10 to 20 percent, depending on the year, on our own ground.

Now, we contract with our grower network, and most of the growers are customers of ours too, so we know them well. We know they’re using regenerative practices. We’ll contract probably anywhere between 6,000 and 15,000 acres a year within our grower network. That’s where the majority of our crops are going to come from, and we can select the regions that we know are going to do best, and we can select the growers that we know are going to do best. And then we always provide the seed stock so that we know what genetics we’re starting with as well.

Acres U.S.A. We commonly think of seed as mostly coming from the Willamette Valley in Oregon; what’s the economic advantage, or feasibility, of growing cover crop seed in Nebraska or Kansas?