Brought to you by:
“It’s about being open to young people in your community that might be interested in agriculture and finding a way to get them on your farm. That's going to look different for everybody and finding good help is hard, and paying good help what they deserve is even harder, but if we can be proactive in trying to find good people rather than good people just falling in our lap, that's going to help us a lot as an industry.”
— Joel Reddick, Grower, Carlisle County, Ky.
In today’s episode of the podcast, brought to you by Sound Agriculture, listen to a conversation between Rockwell City, Iowa grower James Hepp and Carlisle County, Ky., grower Joel Reddick, as they discuss their on-farm cover crop strategies during the Young Farmer Panel at the 2025 National No-Tillage Conference.
Related Content
- [Podcast] Are Cover Crop Monocultures Better than Multi-Species Mixtures?
- [Podcast] Kentucky Leopold Conservation Award Winners Share Secrets to Success
- [Podcast] First-Generation Farmer Unlocks Weed-Suppressing Powers of Cover Crops
- North Carolina Farmer Leverages Cover Crops to Raise Weed-Free Vegetables
The Cover Crop Strategies podcast series is brought to you by SOURCE®️ by Sound Agriculture.
Sound Agriculture delivers bioinspired solutions that enrich soil and improve crops. Our synergistic products empower growers to achieve success while minimizing environmental impact. SOURCE®️ activates the soil microbiome, unlocking nutrients for crops through advanced chemistry. BLUEPRINT™️ offers the highest-quality arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), extending root systems to improve nutrient and water access. Beyond our products, Sound leads the way with programs that support growers in adopting sustainable practices to reduce reliance on synthetic fertilizers while maintaining productivity and profitability.
Full Transcript
Mackane Vogel:Welcome to the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast, brought to you by Sound Agriculture. I'm Mackane Vogel, Associate Editor of Cover Crop Strategies. In today's episode, listen to a conversation between Rockwell City, Iowa grower, James Hepp, and Carlisle County Kentucky grower Joel Reddick as they discuss their on-farm cover crop strategies during the Young Farmer panel at the 2025 National No-Tillage conference.
Joel Reddick:My name's Joel Reddick. I'm from Bardwell, Kentucky. That's about four hours south and west of here, so we're about as far west as you can go and not fall into the Mississippi River. Me and dad have been coming to the conferences since I believe 2018, and that was kind of the kickstart of our journey in changing management and styles of farming, you might say.
Anyway, 2018 we heard a new approach to farming from this stage and I believe it was in Louisville that year if my memory's right. We heard Ray Archuleta up here given his spiel and I'm sure everybody's heard Ray's talk at least once or 50 times depending on how active you are in the soil health circuit. Went home and started roller crimping at small scale and gradually have adopted different soil health principles over time. Lots has changed on the farm and the quality of the land and how things look. We've got new problems, still have problems, significant problems, but there are new problems and I think there are better problems than the problems we had that forced us to make changes. It's been fun and interesting and looking forward to many more years of learning and making good changes.
Speaker 3:James, this is your first time at the conference I believe, and you have a pretty unique story. First generation farmer, correct? In Iowa where there's a lot of legacy farms in Iowa, so give us your background. I think people will be interested to hear your story.
James Hepp:Yeah, so my name is James Hepp. I farm in Rockwell City, Iowa, just west of Fort Dodge a little bit. First generation farmer. Long story short, I went to school, Northwest Missouri State, got my degree, was working in crop insurance. One of my best friends, his dad and his family owned a fair amount of land and was going to be retiring and I was helping some farmers on the side and always had the interest of farming, but my family never had the ground. One thing led to another and he asked me, "Hey, would you mind helping my dad this fall in between insurance stuff?" I said, "Sure." It went really well and he said, "How about you? You want a crop share next year a couple eighties?" One thing led to another and here I am now, I think I'm on year about six, going on seven, 1400 acres, corn, soybeans, oats, rye, no-till all the beans and stuff and we'll strip-till corn. Doing a lot of regenerative stuff. That's kind of my background story.
Speaker 3:You'll be having a classroom later today diving into some of your principles and techniques. There are your reasons right there, James, if you want to explain those.
James Hepp:Yeah. The reasons that I got into no-till and strip-till, several reasons. One, the money. In my area, I'm in a kind of sea of black, they call it. Heavy tillage, really flat mile-long rows. You can see the fence posts, so everybody does a lot of recreational tillage. The ditches get full of dirt in the winter, which is kind of frustrating to see. Obviously there's a huge savings and money. Being a new farmer, I didn't want to have any more tractors than I had to, so I kind of started out of necessity. Then water quality and everybody else's health and stuff is important.
Then obviously family's number one. I have a son Carson, who's three in August, he's about eight months now, so I want to leave everything way better than what I got it. That's kind of my motivation to push the envelope with no-till, strip-till, ROI and just constantly be changing.
Being a first-generation farmer, it's a lot easier for me for change because I don't have a grandpa or a dad kind of scowling at me if I'm doing something weird. The guy that I took over, he was very open. He's like, "Well, whatever you do, if it's good for you, it'll be good for me. I know you're not going to sabotage anything." It's been really great to have kind of a hands-off approach with my landowner. He was starting to do some of the stuff also, I just kind of took it to the next level and started pushing it hard and when I seen the ROI on it. That was my interest and I think I got hooked up with you guys. I've been having field days every year at my farm.
Speaker 3:You may have seen his video on his planter on our YouTube channel maybe.
James Hepp:I think Mackane was at my field day or somebody was. And. That's how I kind of got hooked up with the no-till guys and one thing led to another and here I am.
Speaker 3:Joel, your path is a little bit different. You and your father, Brad, right? Is Brad here? There he is. Front row here. You obviously haven't always been no-till, but what's it like when you're the younger generation coming up and you're collaborating with your dad and he has his ideas, you have your ideas. What's that journey been like?
Joel Reddick:It's been exciting. We started making changes in '18, like I referenced earlier, and the main reason was due to erosion. If you want to throw that up there, that'd be appropriate. This is a rented farm that we have from a neighbor that was a retired farmer and he is also a riverboat captain, so his responsibilities were quite divided. He'd be three weeks farming and then three weeks on the boat, which doesn't leave a whole lot of time for doing the best job that you can. I think he did the best he could with the time he had. He just was a part-time farmer farming over a thousand acres and a lot of neglect on certain aspects of his farm.
This is the worst example of a normal situation in our area. We've got very good soils. It's primarily a silty loess soil that's quite young compared to most and it is quite fertile, but being mostly silt, it's fragile. We get 50, 55 inches of rain a year and most of that comes in the spring, so the springtime rains can have extreme erosion. You can't see the horizons in this picture from your place I'm sure, but you can see different horizons and the A horizon on this farm is largely gone on these hillsides. The hilltops are quite productive, but it's a farm with a lot of mixed ground like this. This is the reason why we have to do something different, why we have to do better.
This is the worst example that I have found, but this problem is not unique to this farm. It's a little bit of everywhere, so we decided that we had to do a better job and 2018 was kind of a pivotal moment when we learned things here at the conference the first time. Another great example, just some water quality issues that can be seen. That's not really highlighted enough in our area because during big rains, and as you can see the size of that corn, it's I think June 22nd if my memory's right and we got two and a half inches, which is a big deal to get that much rain at the end of June. Our neighbor's field there on the left had quite a bit of sediment running out. I'm sure there's lots of fertilizer in that DAP and potash primarily being their inputs on that farm.
Then our field is located directly across the road and had a very different outcome due to a large cover crop, no-till for a couple of years and large cover crops for a couple of years at this point. This picture I think is most startling because we'd only been on this farm for I think two years, two and a half years at this point and could already see major changes in the water quality and erosion, weed control. That was actually a really good corn crop on that farm as well, so it was checking all the boxes.
Then just highlighting some differences in weed pressure. We've got a lot of resistant weeds in our part of the world. Picture on the left was actually taken at a UK field day in 2019 and Enlist had just come out, so it was brand new chemistry on the block. Everybody was excited about it. That's what they're using on the left and it does a good job but you can see all the different herbicide line items in that sign. I can't read them from here, but there's a lot. I added up the cost. It's about $110 an acre for application costs and those products. Now we have Enlist resistant weeds on our farm, Palmer Amaranth being the primary. We sprayed it with a full rate this year at four inches tall and appropriate tank mix partners and such and it did not kill them, so we need an alternative for weed control.
The cover crop and roller crimping has definitely taken the edge off. It's not foolproof. Biggest problem the past few years has been fall droughts and consistency in cover crop is lacking. When you're dealt a bad hand in the fall, that does put your back against the wall with weed control in the following summer. Inconsistencies in the crimping and the cover crop density lead to corresponding densities in weeds the next year.
Then fertility, chicken litter is a big deal for us. There's a lot of poultry houses in our area and we've got four houses ourselves, so it's readily available and affordable as well compared to whatever you can buy at the co-op. Chicken litter and cover crops, as you can see on the right, go quite well together. The picture on the right was one of the biggest cover crops we've ever planted into it was either the last few days of May or the 1st of June on that picture.
Speaker 3:What do you have in there? What is that?
Joel Reddick:That's a lot of things. That's probably eight species. I change it every year it seems with species and rates, but that looks like mostly hairy vetch, but it's actually only two pounds of hairy vetch. It just, when you let it go that long in Kentucky, it can really dominate the mix. We are more careful with hairy vetch now in hindsight, but there's oats and cereal rye, some barley in the understory there. There's crimson clover, Austrian winter peas, there probably was a radish in there that winter killed. We do lots of different plant families, lots of species to try to see what works.
Speaker 3:All right James, now to you, and we could go back on cover crops if you want. Do you use a lot of cover crops in your operation?
James Hepp:Yes. Yep. All our acres are cover crop now. I've been doing primarily rye ahead of soybeans, started throwing in some camelina and some tillage radishes the last couple years. Corn, we have oats, camelina going into that. Kind of a story piggybacking off him. My first year with cover crops I had a 160 acre field and we did half of it, 80 with rye and we were doing non-GMO beans, so you know about weed pressure in that. We used the rye and the weeds just didn't, there was no weeds. It was pretty interesting. I mean I had people drive by and the other part of the field had your typical scapes all over the place and it was a rough year for herbicide anyways and there's just no weeds in it. I even had people call and say, "Man, did you forget to spray half the field or something?" That was what got me going on it. Then like I said, you fast-forward a couple years and now we have about 1400 acres of cover crop.
Speaker 3:You're a first generation farmer, you're getting started, you probably don't have biggest budget, you don't have a fortune to spend on everything you want, so you call this your Godzilla planter. Just what are we looking at here?
James Hepp:It started out as a Case IH 1200 Pivot planter. The guy that I bought all his equipment from, he went ahead and put Precision vSet two meters on it and some of that stuff which was good, but the aftermarket is just not the best for Case IH. For at least the 1200, that's an older planter, about 2008 I think. My Precision guy, he does a lot of wheeling and dealing and he just so happened to have a bunch of ME 5 row units off John Deere, he had 16 of them. Believe it or not, you can bolt on any row unit onto the bar. On the picture on the left was when I had my bar stripped, which if you ever want to second guess yourself, tear a planter apart, not knowing what you're doing. That was a pretty helpless feeling when I took that photo. I knew I was committed at that point.
Anyways, about a month later, that's the row units. We painted them black. U bolts lined up. There's about a $20 plastic piece for my old meters to bolt onto it and so we went through it and for probably around 20 grand I was able to basically go to about a 2018, 2019 vintage row unit. My meters were already about as good as they come. I already had spike closing wheels, so that was a really good. For 20 grand, that doesn't make much of a payment on a new planter and we all know what the price of new planters are. I'm on year about three using it. Works really good.
Speaker 3:What's one thing on there that you think everyone should have on their planter?
James Hepp:Oh, well on my video on the air compressor, we took the bung out of the end and put a little air hose on it so you can blow out. I have in furrow and you always get a little speck of dust in there and stuff and a guy probably shouldn't be sitting there blowing that out with chemicals and stuff like that. It's really nice to have the air compressor, you get graphite talc on it. My air compressor runs some of the stuff on the planter, so like I said, it's got a little air wand and it was like a $50 deal, but man, that thing gets used like 10 times a day. For something easy, cheap, you can go home and do, go to your parts store and get one of those. It works really good.
Speaker 3:Joel, is there anything creative you've done with equipment or an idea you brought to your dad and be like, "Hey, we have to try this" and he's skeptical at first maybe, but you're like, "No, let's do this"? Anything come to mind?
Joel Reddick:Oh, several. I'm trying to think. We've got Yetter's cover crop devastators on the planter. It's a 16 row, 3600 KINZE and they do really well. That was kind of new for us but not crazy by any means, but it just lets us save some labor and crimp and plant in one pass. We bought our old spray rig back from the local H&R dealer and stripped the liquid system off of it and mounted a cedar on it from a guy in Ohio and mounted air booms on it to be able to spread cover crop seed. We have had dry falls like I've mentioned before, so we haven't had much opportunity to use it just because of timing seems to be an issue, but that's one of crazier things we've got right now. That's probably the two most noteworthy.
Speaker 3:All right, some of the other ideas you pursued, if you want to give us the rundown on some of these.
Joel Reddick:We've transitioned to non-GMO corn. We do not have a profitable non-GMO premium. There are premiums available but it costs about as much to get them there as they're worth, so we don't have a profitable non-GMO premium, but we are switching to non-GMO corn and have not seen a yield loss. We've done side-by-side trials with the same hybrids as double stack, as Roundup only and as a non-GMO traded and have yet to see a loss in profitability due to the seed cost savings and then sometimes an increase in yield. We're not doing it for an increase in yield, we're just doing it to save cost on seed and lower that breakeven on some fields that need that ecosystem balancing.
That picture to the left there, it's kind of hard to see, but there's a corn plant in the lower right kind of quadrant and it doesn't have any holes in the leaves. It looks like it could use some sunshine or maybe a dose of nitrogen, but the main thing in this picture is all the other plants in that picture are Palmer amaranth and they're almost hard to identify because they're completely defoliated by a, I forget the name of the beetle, it's a flea beetle. Anyway, the insects are choosing the weed that is a problem in our system and leaving our corn alone, which was very exciting to see. I'd read some and heard some about different ways that you can have insects to remove the pest in the system and the pest in this case would be that Palmer amaranth, so that's exciting to see some of those changes in the ecosystem.
Integrating livestock. We do have one rented farm with cattle and perennial pasture and row crop on the same property, so we've been able to do some work with livestock integration there and grazing on cover crops primarily in the off seasons from the cash crop.
Sixty-inch corn, we tried that a couple of times and I don't think we'll try it again until we can get some fencing and be able to graze a forage crop that's grown in between those wide rows. We don't have any fencing on any other properties that we manage currently, so it would be quite time-consuming and expensive to try that. The reason I say that is that the sixty-inch corn did show a significant yield loss. I've only tried that with one hybrid in two years and they were both planted in late May or early June. It was the last field that we planted in those given years. I don't know that we've given it a completely fair shake, but until we can get some grazing in the equation, I don't think the financial aspects will make sense.
Interseeding cover crops. We interseeded about a 12 species warm season mix in that sixty-inch corn, primarily broadleaves and legumes and a few brassicas as well for the cool season and it grew quite a bit of forage. This picture doesn't do it justice. A month later it was impressive the amount of forage we had available, but until we get cows on these properties it's probably not worth trying again.
We did a strip-till trial with no fertilizer. Chicken litter is our primary source and on this particular field the fertility levels are quite high so we just wanted to test and see if a shank strip-till machine running about eight inches deep. We had a seven-inch compaction layer that was mild in places most of the time, so just seeing the strip-till in action in the cover crops was great to see. This particular strip-till rig was not very aggressive even though it was a shank. By February or March as we broke winter, you couldn't even see where the strip-till pass had gone.
It made about an eight-inch band there and we planted into that, did side-by-side strip trials 40 feet each and saw a seven bushel yield response over two different hybrids in three different fields. Seven bushels is not nothing, but due to the cost of equipment and things, we didn't feel that it was worth investing in a machine to do that. We're putting out typically 600, 700 acres of corn annually and some of that ground is highly erodable, so we're cautious that strip-till is appropriate in those settings. Did not end up pursuing strip-till, but it was great to see a seven bushel response from just the tillage action.
Mackane Vogel:We'll come back to the episode in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our sponsor, Sound Agriculture, for supporting today's podcast. Did you know you can build a water and nutrient superhighway in your soil? You just need the Maximum Acre solution from sound Agriculture, the easiest way to maximize your crops' access to nutrients all season long. First, Source turns your soil into a nutrient factor, then Blueprint builds the delivery network by expanding the crops' reach beyond the roots. For the Maximum Acre solution that provides bigger, healthier crops, source it with Blueprint. Talk to your dealer or visit Sound.ag. Now let's get back to the discussion with James Hepp and Joel Reddick.
Speaker 3:James, I'm curious, you're first generation farmer implementing a no-till system, doing some strip-till, where do you go for your information? What's your source of knowledge? What do you do when you get started with all this?
James Hepp:Well, whenever I do anything I kind of drink from a fire hose, I kind of go in head first, which is good and bad I suppose. Around me there's not a lot of really close people that are doing what I'm doing, but I've had a lot of good support groups like with my Extreme Ag I work with and some of those guys and groups like you guys. There's a lot of good groups on Facebook. I've asked good questions. We get a lot of good dialogue going. Go into a lot of these meetings, you get to meet a lot of great people too. That's what's helped me and I just keep seeing the bottom dollar and I just keep improving on it every year and that's kind of my goal.
Speaker 3:You listen to podcasts or watch any of the stuff on YouTube?
James Hepp:Yeah, that's pretty much all I do when I'm driving or whatever at night, because there's nothing on TV anymore these days, so I'm constantly watching different guys on YouTube or podcasts.
Speaker 3:Got a question in the audience.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's for James. When do you get your cover crops applied and how are you applying them?
James Hepp:Sure. Cover crops applied. On corn stalks going to beans, the last few years we've basically just been broadcasting the mix. I'm in a carbon program so I don't do any tillage besides the strip-till. I got a neighbor that has a VT with a box on it and he leaves the disc blades up but uses the rolling baskets so it works really good. It almost acts like a Yetter Devastator and it just fluffs up the material and it seems like the heavy rye seed gets to the soil and gets covered up. We've been doing that and that's been working really well. Sometimes we don't use the rolling baskets, it just depends.
Then on the soybeans, soon as we get the first yellow leaf, we'll get the airplane called in and they'll fly on the oats and some of that stuff and we'll be probably trying some drones next year a little bit just to see how that works.
Speaker 3:Precision technology. Joel, are you using drones or anything or anything new you're looking to try here soon?
Joel Reddick:We've done some drone seeding just experimentally with different cover crops. We had some Balansa clover and some annual rye grass that I thought would be most suitable due to the small seed size. It was very dry that fall, so didn't see really hardly any changes compared to where we drilled. There wasn't a very good stand broadcasting in a drought. I knew that was probably likely, but wanted to try it nonetheless.
Speaker 3:Question from the audience.
Speaker 5:Both of you are young, full of ideas and intelligence. Without any monetary restrictions or time restrictions, what technique or procedure or tool would you like to try out, each of you?
James Hepp:I'll go for it. Okay, so if money wasn't an issue, what technique I'd like to try? Right now I'm pretty happy with the no-till and strip-till. If anything, I would probably just improve my strip till system. Right now we're looking at getting a strip freshener type system to run in the spring and add my 32 with that. That's what's on the docket to be doing here in the next year or two. I have a custom guy that's going to do some acres this coming year and we're going to see how that works. Then I have kind one in mind for the following year, so that'd be kind where I'm at.
My planter works really good in the no-till. We're kind of experimenting with narrow row beans too. My beans, I use that same planter for beans. I'm running 30-inch beans. We did some 15-inch beans this past year and it worked really good, so we're going to do it again and then go from there. Maybe just kind of polish what I have really for right now.
Joel Reddick:If money wasn't an object, I would probably investigate really hard how to manage an intercropping, relay cropping type system. Similar to Jason Mauck, he's very active on Twitter and publicizing what he's been doing. We've tried some 20-foot wide strip cropping systems. I think there's huge amount of potential in leveraging sunlight and spacing and timing, things that we get for free that I don't think get enough attention. If I could design a planter that could have different row spacing options, maybe twin row or even triple or quad rows somehow to be able to do varying placements as far as width of rows and width of planting sections, that would be what I would do. I think it would be incredible to see what can happen when we change that sunlight in particular. I think it's very powerful and we should not be limited to 30-inch rows, 20-inch rows in our planting systems, but equipment is lacking in that. It's hard to have a tool that does all those things and does them well. That's what I would do if I had an unlimited budget and time to figure it out.
Speaker 3:Another one back here I believe.
Speaker 6:Yeah, this is for both of you guys. You have a lot of farming in the future and I'm just wondering what you guys are really excited about, or is there anything you see in the industry that you're looking forward to, or what is something that you guys are hopeful for or you're excited about?
Joel Reddick:I'm excited about the consumer wanting to see a different product. I'm very soil health motivated ideologically. I think it's better for me to be around. I think it's better for my family to be around. I don't want to handle a pesticide if I don't have to. Finding ways to avoid the costs as well as avoid the hazards. Hopefully in the future, and I think it is happening, the consumer is demanding a product that also aligns with what I want to do on my farm. The trick is figuring out how to get paid for it and to make it make economic sense in an industry at scale that doesn't necessarily agree with that.
I feel like agriculture is fairly divided and a lot of mainstream ag is, "GMOs are fine." Whether they are or not, I don't care. I don't want to use them and I know a lot of customers don't want to use them, but I think there's a lot of division in trying to tell the consumer what they should want rather than just listening to the consumer. If they want to pay us more for it, we need to figure out how to do that.
James Hepp:Yeah, I would agree with that too. I think it's kind of a new frontier moving forward with consumers. It seems like in the past we were kind of narrow on what we could do. Now I'm running conventional corn. I'm running an E3 bean just to help with weed escapes, but there's just a lot more options. A lot of guys are really thinking outside of the box and trying new things. Two years ago I started Y dropping. That's been a huge thing. I mean, it paid for itself the first year. There's just a lot of good groups. I mean I've got my nitrogen down to about 0.6, 0.7 per bushel and that's very doable. It was really scary doing it the first year, but it works. There's just a lot more support groups.
I think some of the people in the past didn't communicate as much, at least in my neighborhood besides at the coffee shop, I think the guy called it yesterday the liar table or something like that. I thought that was pretty good. It's a new frontier. These people, they want what they want and they're willing to pay now. Soil health is very important to me and I'm going to do it regardless, but if we can get paid and get a premium for it, then I'm all for it.
Speaker 3:During Ray McCormick's presentation yesterday, he talked about all the conservation ag heroes. What's it going to take for the next generation to carry the torch? What do you think are some of the keys to keeping this thing going and maybe having the no-till conference go for another 30 years? It's a tough one, I know.
James Hepp:Yeah, well just for everything. I mean, I think we all have to really, the younger crowd has to really step up. I can count on my hands how many guys that are under 40 farming in my area and we're a pretty good-sized area. I mean the average farm is probably 1500 acres, so we don't have a lot of really big farmers, so there should be a lot more, but it trickles down. We have to all step up and do more. I mean your communities, churches and fire departments are short on help, but so we need to find a way to bring young people back and that's kind of my goal.
I don't like airing my laundry out, but I like to tell people how my operation got started because my long-term goal is to try and find a way where if we could put one young farmer in every county in the Midwestern United States farming, that's extremely doable. Every county has at least one guy wanting to retire that doesn't have another family member. If we could rejuvenate that with a young family, I mean that would just multiply in ripples and help communities.
Speaker 3:What do you think, Joel?
Joel Reddick:I think a lot of things. I think it's not unique to the farming community, first of all. I think all of our rural communities are struggling and it's maybe most signified on the farm, but there's so many little towns across rural America that are a shadow of what they once were. We're probably young enough that we've never even seen them how they once were, but we hear stories and you can see old buildings falling in that used to be thriving businesses.
I think it's a problem that's bigger than agriculture, but to try to focus it in on what we can do, I think it's being open to young people in your community that might be interested and find a way to get them on your farm. I know that's going to look different for everybody. Finding good help is hard, and paying good help what they deserve is even harder, but we've got to be open to it and looking. If you're not looking for something, it's very difficult to find it because then they've got to find you. If we can be proactive in trying to find good people rather than good people just falling in our lap, that's going to help us a lot as an industry.
Speaker 7:What's one thing you did last year that didn't work or failed and something you're going to do next year different on your operation? That can be equipment, that can be cover crops, biological, fertility, just anything.
James Hepp:In my area we've had pretty good drought here the last few years and I've tried a lot of pretty neat items, like some biologicals and stuff and did strips and it wasn't a good year to give a good shake. That was kind of disappointing. We had some pretty good stuff documented, but the whole field wasn't very good, so it was kind of hard to blame or say that was good or bad. I guess I'll keep trying new stuff. Equipment is probably my weak link. It's always constant fix and repeat. That's what I'm planning on doing, just keep making things better, I guess.
Joel Reddick:Changes moving forward. It's always easy in hindsight to look back and see what you could have done, should have done. In this year, timing with corn planting in particular. We had a very wet May. It was the second-wettest May for our area recorded in the last 133 years. It was incredibly wet. I think it was 15 or 16 inches in about four weeks, five weeks. It was incredibly wet and we should have read the tea leaves better in March and in early April and pulled the trigger on planting a little sooner. I think if we'd have started 10 days earlier, that would've been a lot more corn planted before those floods, because June corn is not good. Just about anywhere I think that's probably true.
June corn is worse than good condition April corn and the weather was good, in hindsight, in April. You never know in Kentucky when it's going to turn back to 35 degrees, 40 degrees and just muddy. We should have gone a little quicker and next year we hopefully will be better at reading those tea leaves and then analyzing the forecast and soil conditions and make better decisions as far as planting timing. That would be a key to move forward better.
Speaker 3:Last call for questions in the audience. Anyone? I'm going to put you guys on the spot with this one. In the one plus day you've been here at the conference, what's one big takeaway or something that stood out? Whether it be an interaction in the hallway, something you picked up on in a classroom, something someone said in a general session, anything come to mind? It could be a couple things if you want.
Joel Reddick:I think Mr. Horsch's talk yesterday was very interesting. I'd heard of Horsch of course, from just in the industry and you see them making moves kind of in North America. It was just very interesting to hear his perspective from a European perspective. Don't hear that a lot where we're very American-centric, I think as American farmers. Other people look to us, but we don't necessarily look to other people as often. It was quite refreshing to hear just a story of a man who started something with his family and is now one of the leading manufacturers in the world for equipment. That's absolutely incredible and remarkable that he was able to accomplish that and that they still farm today. You don't hear that about John Deere or any of these others. They don't have a family farm as their testing ground for equipment and development. That's very intriguing and be watching Horsch with great interest in the years to come.
Speaker 3:James, your first conference, anything surprise you?
James Hepp:No, it's been everything that I expected it to be. I really like listening to guys in person. I mean, I'm so used to watching YouTube or podcasts, stuff like that, so it was really nice to see. Like I said in Rick Clark's meeting yesterday, that was really neat. Just a lot of these speakers, it's really good to interact with them instead of just watching them. I like that aspect and the conversations you get later on with the guys are always good too.
Mackane Vogel:That's it for this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies podcast. Thanks to today's guests, Joel Reddick and James Hepp, and thanks as always to our sponsor, Sound Agriculture, for helping to make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode and our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at covercropstrategies.com/podcasts. For our entire staff here at Cover Crop Strategies, I'm Mackane Vogel. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
