What have you learned about why that happens and what can farmers do to reduce that risk?

Oh, gosh, we we need a whole nother podcast to talk about that.

This is a topic that's really interesting to me and my colleagues.

So there and there's kind of some competing theories for why this occurs, which is fun as a scientist, because we're we're exploring these theories through agronomic science.

Right.

So one of the theories is called a green bridge theory, and that's kind of the shorthand for it.

But the idea is that the cover crop actually might uh provide a habitat or a green bridge from the fall to the spring normally where that when in the conventional system where you have no plant growing it between there a lot of pests would die from the harsh winter but having that cover crop there actually might provide a green bridge or allow some of those pests to move through the winter and survive the winter.

Tell us about how adding alfalfa and a standing corn crop, that's also something to consider.

Um, first, when you say long-term, I'm curious how, how long-term is long-term in this context? Um, and then are, are these something where you're just visiting, like someone, like someone else is doing an experiment on XYZ and you just are like, "Hey, I'm just gonna sample your soil real quick," [chuckles] and then rather than you, like, having a long-term experiment that is specifically testing these principles?

principles?Yeah, great questions.

So to answer your first question about long-term, so some of them are longer than others.

[chuckles] Um, we, you know...

And actually a colleague of mine, uh, professor emeritus, retired, uh, faculty, Matt Liebman, started up a, an experiment called the Marsden Agriculture Diversification Experiment.

He didn't even think that it was going to be a long-term experiment.

He was planning on a grant cycle of three to five years.

Um, so I would love to hear about kind of the one-to-one or one-to-many relationships that were there, um, as well as kind of what your other results were.