The 2025 National Cover Crop Summit is right around the corner. The fully digital event takes place from March 18-20 and is completely free for all attendees who would like to register. The Summit will feature 6 outstanding presentations from 7 excellent speakers. Here is one of our speakers, Butler County, Pa. grower William Thiele, to give you a quick preview of his presentation which is titled, “Using Cover Crops as a Forage.”

“Since we’re talking about making covers as a forage, don’t look at covers as just covers, if that makes sense. So, we thought at first that covers were just preventing erosion, which they do. But they can do so much more. And so when we found out that covers can fix nitrogen and mine phosphorus and all these things, we thought there’s a lot of benefit to this. And after that, which you’ll find in my presentation that necessity is the mother of invention, because we had to, we saw covers as a potential feed source — we consulted with our nutritionist and he said maybe you should try to use this as a forage. And we never thought of that — cover crops are just cover crops right? Well, they are, but they can also be used as a forage. So we did that out of necessity and we found great benefits from that and it’s now part of our regular farm plan to do that for years to come.”

The 2025 National Cover Crop Summit will also feature Gary Zimmer, Nick Vos, Jim Stute, Roger & Nick Wenning and Alyssa Essman, so be sure to head to covercropstrategies.com to register for the free event.