Brought to you by:
“My grandfather would always say, ‘you could wrap a chain around a ryegrass plant and you could pull the whole earth up by it.’ And that was true because the amount of roots that were there and to see that stuff interact in the soil is pretty substantial. It's pretty neat.”
— Jay Baxter, Grower, Georgetown, Del.
For this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies podcast, brought to you by GS3 Quality Seed, I had the opportunity to travel to Jay Baxter’s farm in Georgetown, Del., and talk to him about cover crop seeding and termination methods, his opinion on multi-species cover crop mixes, the rich history of his family farm and much more.
Related Content
- Dry Spell Puts Cover Crops to the Test
- A Win-Win for Cover Crops in the Chesapeake Bay
- Curbing Nitrogen Runoff in the Chesapeake Bay with Data, Precise Placement
- Soil Health Practices Helping Chesapeake Bay Farmers
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. For this episode, I had the opportunity to travel to Jay Baxter's farm in Georgetown, Delaware, and talk to him about crop crop seeding and termination methods, his opinion on multi-species cover crop mixes, the rich history of his family farm, and much more.
Jay Baxter:Yeah, we were talking inner cropping on wheat. That's something that, we got away from growing wheat because we found that, when we put a pencil to it, we weren't making any money at it. We could grow a double-crop of soybeans behind wheat, plant it in July, July 1, something like that. We could get 50 to 60 bushel to the acre. If I can grow 75 or 80 bushel to the acre full season soybeans, it's just as well for us. Plus, I don't have the extra trouble and hassle of growing wheat. Just about the time we should be harvesting wheat and planting soybeans, double-crop is when we're hot and heavy in irrigating. There's only so much of us to go around. We found it's just easier.
Then we started messing with this inner cropping thing, just because it seemed interesting and there's a chance that we could push the yields both directions there. That's what we're in the middle of an experiment right now. So far, it's not working out, truth be known. But I think every good experiment needs multiple replications, so that's what we're in the middle of now.
Mackane Vogel:You mention irrigation. Driving up here, or driving down here rather, it looks like there is a lot of that around here. I'm just curious, is that a necessity you would say around these parts?
Jay Baxter:Yeah. We can't farm without it, really. Some years, there's a 200 bushel to the acre difference between irrigated to dry land.
Mackane Vogel:Make sense. Obviously, weather is still important. I don't know if it's the same for you guys, but last year around the corn belt, we had just super dry, and this year it's super wet.
Jay Baxter:Yeah, you guys are off to a wet start, for sure.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah. Everybody's trying to figure out how to navigate. Does that just not really affect you guys with irrigation then, or is it still something you guys got to worry about?
Jay Baxter:We mitigate the dry, obviously. We get a wet year, then we're ... There's an old saying around here that "a dry year will make you crazy, a wet year will make you broke." Really, because we can't pump it off.
Mackane Vogel:Right, right.
Jay Baxter:We've had those kind of years within the last 10. We've had a couple of those kind of years that are really scary, the amount of water we get.
Mackane Vogel:Sure.
Jay Baxter:Honestly, that seems to be a trend for us also, is that we get extreme weather events. No more half-inch of rain every couple days kind of thing. We'll get four and five inches of rain in an hour. That's hard to mitigate anything, because it all runs to one place. We can only hold so much in our soil anyway. That's the benefit of cover cropping and a lot of these no-till practices that we're doing. But we're so flat, that yeah, we do have let's say valleys or holes, or something like that, but there's only a two or three-foot difference between the hill and the valley. But it all goes to the lower spot, and then it sits there, and that becomes a zero in your yield. That really does throw things off.
We're only about, in some areas, single-digits above sea level. That's interesting, too. Guys, they'll hear my last comment and they'll say, "Well, why don't you tile?" Well, we can't tile because we can't get our tile deep enough. There's a research farm near here and they're actually pumping water off through a tile system, but that's for the sake of experiment and for the sake of research. It's interesting to watch that play out.
We're 90% irrigated here, all center pivots. We've got about 37 center pivots now. Anywhere from eight and nine towers, to two and three. If we can irrigate, we're going to irrigate it, that's all. Because again, that's the difference between a 25 bushel to the acre and 200 bushel to the acre, 225 bushel to the acre. There's guys locally growing 300 bushel to the acre. That happens on a pretty regular basis, so we can keep up with the corn belt pretty well.
Mackane Vogel:I want to get a little bit of history. How long have this farm been in the family? Is it multiple generations?
Jay Baxter:My great-grandfather moved here from Baltimore and started a tomato cannery. We say it that he moved here, but he actually moved back home. He had family in the area. Moved to this area because of the proximity of to the railroad and started the tomato cannery. My grandfather, one of his first jobs was pulling potato bugs off of tomato plants with a can of turpentine. That's what got us a start here.
My grandfather, today's D-Day. My grandfather went to Europe and rode across Europe on a Jeep. He made it all the way back home. He got home Christmas Eve, 1945. Right before he left to go in the service, he had actually bought where we are. This was his first farm that he bought. Obviously, he was farming a little bit with his father, but this was his first farm. Was able to send all the money back home and pay for this farm while he was at the war. That's pretty substantial to us.
Now, we fast-forward, my father and my uncle were here, they both since passed. My grandfather's passed. I farm in a regular basis with my sister, who coincidentally is on vacation this week. That's it. We've got family ties on multiple sides of our families that take us back to land grants here. We go back to the 1700s in some places on some of the farms that we have acquired or that we're tilling that belonged to, let's say my mother's side of the family. That's pretty special to us, that we can say we go back to Colonial times.
Mackane Vogel:When did all the conservation stuff come about? Was that your generation?
Jay Baxter:Yeah, that was my generation. Really, when you think back at it, it just came around full-circle. I didn't invent any of this stuff.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:I talked at the no-till conference a couple years ago and I made an example of a clover inter-seeder that my grandfather used. We still got them. Obviously, we don't use them. That was something that they were doing, inter-seeding clover into a corn crop that was planted on a checkerboard method. They were able to feed that corn crop using crimson clover throughout the year. Now, we're back to doing the same thing. My wife and I have a cover crop business where we're inter-seeding a cover crop into a standing cash crop with a 90-foot Miller highboy.
It's funny how all this stuff, we're seen as this maverick or something like that, or something that's a novel idea, but it's not. We're just taking sometimes that previous generations did out of necessity, and we're tweaking it and making it work for our operation in 2024.
Mackane Vogel:Sure.
Jay Baxter:That's something that the local conservation district invested in. We've got an agreement with them now that we lease it from them and we do the work. We started a business where we'd go out and do custom work for other farmers. Sell seed, inter-seed for them, or come in right behind the columbine. That seems to be the more popular method because we can get across a lot of ground in a lot of time, or in a little bit amount of time. That's one less step that a farmer's got to do and they get their cover crop in, because we all have seen the benefit of cover cropping, but time is the one thing that we don't have a lot of.
Mackane Vogel:Right. It's planting in green then, right? You're planting into living?
Jay Baxter:Yeah.
Mackane Vogel:Okay.
Jay Baxter:Yeah. Every year, we experiment with it to figure out when would be an optimum timing, whether we wait until a V5, or a V8, or wait until we've gone to black layer on a corn crop, or something like that. That seems to be the most popular time, is after black layer. But by a lot of farmers, that's when they want us to go, is right after black layer. That way, as the corn crop starts to suness, it opens up that canopy, and lets light shine through and get that cover crop established. But in some situations where you get a dry time, well, we've stopped irrigating by that point in time, too. If we can get up a little bit before that and let that irrigation catch up, and help to get that cover crop seed germinated, then we're not wasting irrigation and we're germinating our cover crop to get it established. It's a win-win.
That's that sweet spot for a lot of us that we've gotten into. It's a work in progress.
Mackane Vogel:Sure. When did you guys start doing that?
Jay Baxter:This will be our third season.
Mackane Vogel:Okay. Do you feel like you've seen an increase in people diversifying to vegetables now that people are talking about diversifying crop rotations? Have you noticed anything along those lines at all?
Jay Baxter:Our area has been known for growing vegetables for generations. My great-grandfather started with tomatoes. Delaware grows more baby Lima beans than anywhere else in the country. We're growing sweet corn. There's a lot of fresh market because of our proximity to the market with New York City, and Washington, DC, and Baltimore. There's always a market for fresh.
On a large scale farming operation, I don't necessarily see a whole lot of change happening there because we've already been established. There's so many farmers that have always grown vegetables. There's a lot of farmers that vegetables are their bread-and-butter and always have been for generations. The closer you get to the Delaware Bay, the more moderated the temperatures become. That's where Lima beans tend to thrive, and peas, and things like that. That's not necessarily something that's maybe a little bit of the typical ebb-and-flow in the market. But there's not anybody grasping to hurry up and come onto a new market.
That's something that we purse personally. Our farm is trying to convince the political side of the world to allow a market to exist or to be established. If we've got nowhere to sell our crop, then why do we even farm? If we can keep those markets open and create new markets, whether it be a cannery or a processor of some type of some further processing to come about, I feel that's where we'll be able to survive. Because the biggest thing growing around here right now is houses, with our proximity to the beach. Everybody is flocking here and farms are being sold out on a pretty regular basis.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:You can't hardly blame them when you hear the numbers people are talking. You got to love what you do, otherwise it's a dying breed.
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 and filtration, 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.tilthpro.com. That's T-I-L-T-H Pro.com.
Are you 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 Jay Baxter.
The other thing I was going to ask you, I think I was reading that you were working with the University of Delaware a couple years ago on a hairy vetch before soybeans thing.
Jay Baxter:Hairy vetch before soybeans? I think maybe it was more of a cover crop in general.
Mackane Vogel:Okay. Just trying to see what-
Jay Baxter:Yeah. What the amount of biomass-
Mackane Vogel:Okay.
Jay Baxter:... and how it affected yields, and plant establishment, and things like that.
Mackane Vogel:Sure.
Jay Baxter:Yeah. That was through the university. That was some work we were doing, again, just with cover crops in general. They had multiple farmers around. Coincidentally, my favorite is hairy vetch.
Mackane Vogel:Okay.
Jay Baxter:That was the crop of the time.
Mackane Vogel:Got it.
Jay Baxter:That farm ended up, I think that was the Lima bean study that we ended up doing. It was a tweaked version of a cash crop, but we were able to get yield data off of it and do what we wanted to do. We've done quite a bit of research with a lot of different cover crops in cash crops.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:Corn, for instance, that's one that's, hands down, I can show you maps right to the spot where we've not grown. That all came about from a university research project. I think the soybean one you're referring to, was that a SARE funded project?
Mackane Vogel:I think so. That's sounds-
Jay Baxter:Yeah. That was one of those things that I was more or less hands off of.
Mackane Vogel:Okay.
Jay Baxter:It was just, "Hey, you do your thing. Here's the ground for you to work with." I was just put to keep on farming like we are. I can't chime into a lot of details there.
Mackane Vogel:No worries.
When was the last time you were at a no-till conference, that was a couple years ago you said?
Jay Baxter:Yes.
Mackane Vogel:We're always looking for speaker and topic ideas, so if you think of anything.
Jay Baxter:I had thrown some ideas out when I was there, what we started talking about with the Chesapeake Bay.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:That's one of those subjects that I think everyone needs to hear.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:That's what tweaked a little bit of Loren's interest when we went out and spoke with him.
Mackane Vogel:Right.
Jay Baxter:At his field day, a couple years ago, was just we've already set the pace and set the precedent on the environment and water quality. And proven how soil health practices go hand-in-hand with that.
Mackane Vogel:Right.
Jay Baxter:Look, if we're going to be required to do this stuff, then let's get out in front of it. That's been my big push to the farmers out in the Midwest that think, "Let's go out, let's do our fall tillage. Let's do our fall application of anhydrous and let it get snowed on, and we'll go from there." Man, if we did that here, we'd be crucified.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:We've got to open some people's eyes to the change is coming, whether we like it or not. The sooner we can get out in front of it as an industry, the sooner we can get out in front of it as friends and peers, the better off we're going to be to work with these environmental organizations that are ... They're coming for us and that's a fact. If we can prove that we're doing our due diligence and that we've got the evidence, we've got the science to prove that what we're doing is the right thing to do, then it's a win-win.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:Any time I go speak, especially obviously away from here, but we have to first start off with a geography lesson. You know, but how many people that talk to you from where you grew up have no idea that there's agriculture here?
Mackane Vogel:Oh, yeah.
Jay Baxter:Especially on the scale in which it is and the diverse scope in which it is. That's always fun, to start off there, and then get talking about the environment and why we do what we do. Because again, I think one of the biggest takeaways I took to those guys at Loren's was, "Look to your neighbor. If that's somebody from NRCS or somewhere like that, you need to get to know them because you two need to work hand-in-hand, because the guy that's coming to take his place, you're not going to like." That's huge.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah, that's a great point. Even in the Midwest, even though obviously it's different than being around the Chesapeake here, there's [inaudible 00:17:33].
Jay Baxter:Oh, yeah.
Mackane Vogel:There's a lot of stuff that would still be applicable to corn belt farmers to hear that kind of stuff.
Jay Baxter:I'm drawing a blank from where they were from. Toledo, I think it was. A new station from Toledo, Ohio, came here to this farm to see the air seeder work, to talk about cover crops, because they were having such an issue with a spring algae bloom in the lakes.
Mackane Vogel:Wow.
Jay Baxter:That Toledo had to shut down its water supply. It was all being pointed back to what we're doing as far as point source pollution. Some of these practices are becoming a point source. If we can't keep our drinking water clean because of the fertilizer we applied nine months ago, then we got to do something different. There's an awful lot of people in Toledo, Ohio that are going to put the Michigan and Ohio farmers out of business because they've got a lot bigger say than what a handful of farmers do.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:The 1%, the one-and-a-half percent of the farming population, we don't have much vote anymore.
Mackane Vogel:Just comparing cover crop, really those mixes that have 15 different things in them, what do you do? Is it more bare bones than that? Is there benefit to having these crazy 12 blend mixes?
Jay Baxter:I've asked that question multiple times myself. What's the benefit of 35 way mix?
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:What's the purpose of anything more than three and four? I can throw certain things out because I know what they do in my soil and I like to use them. I like vetch. It's my favorite. If I had to pick one species, I'd pick vetch, it doesn't matter where it is. We've found that vetch is sometimes difficult with soybeans that are planted full season that are planted early because of slugs. Slugs love vetch.
Mackane Vogel:Yeah.
Jay Baxter:A lot of times, soybeans can't outgrow that slug damage. That's one of those things that we have to work with a little bit.
Mackane Vogel:Is that the main pest you guys deal with here, slugs?
Jay Baxter:Oh, no, we've got all kinds of pests. We could go on and on.
Mackane Vogel:[inaudible 00:19:42]?
Jay Baxter:No, insects.
Mackane Vogel:Oh, insects. Yeah.
Jay Baxter:Yeah, insects is the issue.
Mackane Vogel:The main thing.
Jay Baxter:But rye has always been the next thing because it gives you a lot of biomass, it's big, it's cheap. I like it, but sometimes it's too big. Sometimes it's too much to work with, to work through. Yeah, we're trying to build our soil and we want that biomass. My grandfather, for years and years, tried to get me to grow rye grass. It was interesting because, back to my grandfather, he had a Farmall A, and a little six-volt electric spreader that would mount on the back of that thing. He would, of all things, would grow rye grass into a corn crop. That was just building their soil.
Well, that's so unheard of, putting a grass in a corn crop, because they'd compete with each other. Well, back in the '40s and '50s, that's really all they knew and they made it work. Anyway, he would always say, "You could wrap a chain around a rye grass plant and you could pull the whole earth up by it." That was true because the amount of roots that were there. To see that stuff interact in the soil is pretty substantial, it's pretty neat. Trying to source a good rye grass seed that's clean is a little bit difficult. A lot of guys around here growing wheat, they hear rye grass and they automatically think the weed pressure that comes from rogue seeds, and things like that. Same with vetch.
As we talked before, we're learning that oats do things for us that other crops don't, as far as pulling potassium out of the soil and making it available to the plant. If I can capture those kind of things, that's what I'm after, not just a big cover crop. We know what that part does, but if I can get a big cover crop out of something else that's more useful, which that's where vetch was such a turn on for me because of we were planting cover crop, we're not planting something that's really worthwhile. Then if we get our timing right, radishes work out really well for us. A lot of guys like radishes.
Mackane Vogel:Like a daikon?
Jay Baxter:Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Daikon radishes, they've been a pretty good staple around here. If we blend the three of those together, a grass, along with vetch, and throw some radish in there and get it out there early, it works out really well.
I've got a couple friends locally that are doing some research where they're coming in with that same mix. They assume that that radish is going to die off in the winter, which if we get a cold enough winter, it does. Sometimes they don't. This past year, they didn't. Two years ago, they did. It just depends. But they're coming in in early spring with a Clethodim herbicide treatment and killing off the grass, and therefore all they have is the legume growing. Therefore, it's not as complicated to plant through to plant green with their planter, but yet they get the biomass of the grass growing in the fall and the nutrient update that they wanted. There's the Chesapeake Bay model again, we're pulling up nutrients and holding onto them. That works out as a win-win.
We're not quite there yet. Back to your original question of 15 way mix, we'll play with a little bit of that. But again, some of those seem really unnecessary, especially when you're talking a half-a-pound of the acre. People say, "Well, there's diversity in the soil." Okay, yeah, I get that part, but I'm not there yet. That's my thing. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm not saying it's right. My farm and how we do things, I'm just not there yet with it.
Mackane Vogel:And wanting to be more intentional about what's in there-
Jay Baxter:Yeah.
Mackane Vogel:... and what each thing is doing.
Jay Baxter:Right. As opposed to throwing a kitchen sink at it and see which one works good. Well, let's do some research and figure out which one we want, concentrate on them, and make our own mix how exactly we want.
Mackane Vogel:What kind of termination methods have you played around with over the years, pretty much everything?
Jay Baxter:Yeah, pretty much. We don't have a roller crimper. Dale, that just came in, his dad's got one and we've used it a time or two. It works out well. The profile was wrong for us because we're planting 16 rows, so we're 40-foot wide, and that's a 15-foot crimper. It didn't quite work out because it had stuff going in different directions.
We'll run vertical tillage. We run a cross-accelerator. That one in particular, we can adjust the pitch of the blades and adjust the height. A lot of times, we're running where it's just tickling the ground, but it's laying the cover crop over the direction we want. Something like that vetch, if it gets too big and too wiry, we'll run it right in front of the planter.
Typically, we try to plant green. That's our go-to is we're set up with our planter to plant green. It seems like every year, there's something to tweak a little bit and no two years are the same. You just have to roll with it a little bit. A lot of guys that aren't patient or don't have the patience to figure something out, this is where they get turned off with cover crops. One thing we have learned over the years is we will not terminate it with herbicide in front of the planter because it becomes a mess. That, a lot of times, planting green is so much easier, and then we'll come right behind the planter and terminate it with herbicide, or sometimes the planter terminates it enough itself. Or that vertical tillage pass right in front of the planter terminates it real well.
We've got some ground now that we're preparing for Lima bean planting, which will be in the next couple weeks. Actually, James went out there and terminated it the first part of the week with vertical tillage. Just deep enough that it cut the biomass up, and sized it, and killed it, terminate it, laid it flat. Within a week-and-a-half, we can go in there, that stuff will be crispy. We'll go in there with row cleaners on the planter and have a nice seedbed, and it works out really well for us.
Mackane Vogel:That's all for this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast. Thanks to Jay Baxter for that great discussion. The full transcript of this episode, as well as our archive of previous podcast episodes, are available at cropcropstrategies.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.
