Green Cover Podcast

Patrick Cavanaugh spent 13 years as an engineer on the space shuttle program, and today he leads soil and vine health at Union Grove Farm in North Carolina. Keith Berns and Patrick talk about how Union Grove is rebuilding degraded farm ground with vermicompost extracts, cover crops, and rotationally grazed sheep, and how Patrick measures whether the soil is getting better. The ideas apply to any f...

Along with her family, Benina Montes of Burroughs Family Farms runs the world's first regenerative organic certified almond orchard, producing walnuts, olives, year-round sheep, and 8,000 laying hens in California's Central Valley. She and Keith talk about how a catch frame harvester lets her keep the orchard floor covered, how cover crops and grazing cut her water use by about 30%, and ho...

Kevin Elmy joins the podcast to share how he turned a sandy, worn-out quarter section in Saskatchewan into 26+ inches of rich topsoil, using winter cereals, cover crops, and livestock instead of synthetic inputs. He digs into practical wins any farmer can try this fall — interseeding winter triticale with durum, letting cover crops do their job early instead of chasing a big biomass at season'...

Podcast host Keith Berns sits down with his brother and Green Cover co-founder, Brian Berns, Green Cover sales rep Zach Louk and Green Cover's Contract Seed Production Manager, Scott Ravenkamp to describe how each of the six Soil Health Principles is applied on each of their vastly different operations.

A single Nebraska field trial revealed that fall-applied biology can fix nitrogen straight out of the air and unlock phosphorus already locked in the soil — turning $30 worth of product into over $450 in nutrient value. Keith Berns sits down with David Olson of Sustainable Growing Solutions to break down the science behind the Decomposer and HyprCycle+ program, from how saprophytic fungi break dow...

Nitrogen fertilizer costs U.S. farmers $5 billion a year — but a good chunk of it is sitting in the atmosphere for free. Zach Lauck joins Keith to break down which legumes actually pull their weight (hairy vetch, winter peas, clovers), why timing and planting depth make or break them, and how new inoculants and free-living microbes can fix nitrogen even without a legume in the mix. If you're l...

Green Cover's Nathan Choat joins Keith to explain why the company runs hundreds of test plots every year — and why every farmer should be running small trials on their own ground, too. They dig into corn and soybean interseeding, nutrient cycling data, and why what works at someone else's field day might not work on your farm. Green Cover's summer field days are August 4th and 5th in B...

In this episode of the Green Cover Podcast, host Keith Berns talks with Karl Palmberg, a former F-16 pilot turned grass-fed beef producer in Larchwood, Iowa, about building a regenerative cattle operation from the ground up. Karl breaks down how he uses cover crops, baleage, and even carefully-timed corn silage to hit a 1:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio in his beef (versus roughly 10:1 for typical feed...

After nearly four years of delays, the USDA has finalized guidance for the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit, and it's opening up real financial opportunities for corn and soybean farmers. Mitchell Hora, seventh-generation Iowa farmer and founder of Continuum Ag, breaks down how a farm's Carbon Intensity (CI) score works and how lowering it through cover crops, no-till, and better nitrogen...

Wheat harvest isn't the end of your growing season, it's the start of a new opportunity. In this episode, Keith sits down with longtime cover crop expert Dale Strickler to talk through what to plant after wheat comes off, and how to turn those acres into high quality forage and free nitrogen for next year's crop. Dale breaks down the best species for summer grazing versus winter stockp...

Mark Thomas has spent 30-plus years in the grass seed industry, and today he ranches south of Enid, Oklahoma with his wife Annette — raising 100% grass-fed beef on a system built around diverse annual and perennial forages. In this conversation, Keith and Mark dig into some of the most practical questions in regenerative grazing: How do you integrate perennials with annuals? When does it make sens...

Allison Lepanto of Aterak Nutrition started out wanting to improve the quality of horse feed. But after seeing the prevalence of metabolic issues in younger and younger horses, surviving her own herbicide health crisis, and stepping onto farm after farm with dead soil and overflowing supplement shelves, she started connecting the dots. Pasture quality and the practices land owners are implementing...

Green Cover sales representative and seed buyer Zach Louk joins Keith for an in-depth conversation on warm season cover crop species. The conversation covers legumes, brassicas, broadleaves and grasses with a specific focus on sorghum-sudan grass traits and characteristics. This episode will give you a greater understanding of which cover crop species are best fit for your goals this summer growin...

Jay Fuhrer spent more than 45 years as a soil health specialist with NRCS watching farming systems break down soils — and then helping farmers rebuild them. Now leading the Mennoken Farm just east of Bismarck, North Dakota, Jay shares what decades of boots-on-the-ground monitoring taught him about diverse plant communities, liquid carbon, biological energy, and why the soil carbon needle that nobo...

Kevin Wiltse is a fifth-generation Kansas farmer who has spent over a decade transitioning from cash cropping to perennial pasture and grazing cover crops for more profitable grazing. Five years into one of the worst droughts in recent memory, his cattle herd is bigger than it's ever been. In this episode, Keith sits down with Kevin to talk through his shift to a forage-based, perennial-centered o...

Kelly Ryerson and Ryland Englehart co-founded American Regeneration to close the gap between what the best regenerative farmers know and what policymakers have never heard. In this episode, they share their unlikely journeys — from fighting pesticides and running vegan restaurants — to becoming two of regenerative agriculture's most passionate advocates. They dig into their work connecting soi...

Glenn and Carol Elzinga of Alder Spring Ranch were losing cattle to wolves, losing money, and ready to walk away from everything — until they discovered that the answer wasn't new technology or better systems, but going back to the way God designed animals and land to work together. By stopping fighting creation and starting to work with it, they watched their soil organic matter triple, plant...

In this episode, Keith welcomes back Greg Thoren, a regenerative farmer from northwest Illinois, for a highly anticipated follow-up conversation. Greg farms approximately 2,400 acres that are all no-till, non-GMO, and cover cropped. This time around, Keith and Greg discuss Greg's 60-inch row corn system, sharing why the wider row spacing has been a game-changer. Greg has found that 60 inch spa...

In this episode of the Green Cover Podcast, host Keith Berns welcomes Abe Collins of Vermont, an innovative farmer and systems thinker who has spent decades developing tools and practices to rapidly heal degraded land. Abe shares how combining deep rooted plant diversity, custom rip sower technology, and biological inputs can dramatically improve soil health, water infiltration, and drought resili...

In this episode, Keith sits down with Alex Frazier, a fourth-generation farmer and agronomist from South Dakota, who has been interseeding cover crops into his soybeans for six years. Alex shares how planting a simple mix of oats, rye, and flax alongside his beans — then terminating it six to eight weeks later — has helped him boost his farm's soybean average from 39 to 52 bushels per acre while r...

In this episode, consultant and Illinois farmer David Kleinschmidt discusses the tragic 2023 dust storm on Interstate 55 that claimed seven lives, exploring how it reveals a deeper crisis in soil health. David shares his journey from ag retail to soil health consulting, emphasizing that erosion is fundamentally a biological problem, not just a mechanical one. He offers practical advice on getting...

Jay Young farms in southwest Kansas, one of the harshest environments to prove regenerative agriculture works. With just 14 to 16 inches of annual rainfall, high winds, and a conventional farming culture, Jay has built a system around grazing cattle on cover crops, eliminated phosphorus for five years, cut nitrogen rates in half, and still produces 100+ bushel corn and milo. In this conversation,...

Joe Ailts is a regenerative agronomist from Wisconsin with an unusual hobby: growing giant pumpkins. In this conversation, Joe breaks down the biological processes he uses to push pumpkins to extreme sizes, from mycorrhizal fungi networks to optimizing plant efficiency at every stage. What makes this interesting is how much of it translates directly to row crop farming. The same principles Joe use...

Raymond Epp is an American who grew up in a conventional farming family in Nebraska. His curiosity led him to Canada as a young man, where he pursued an education in Biblical Studies. There, he met his wife, who eventually brought him to Japan. In Japan, Raymond started a farm and became a significant figure in the country's adoption of regenerative agriculture. He shares his journey, includin...

In this special Thanksgiving edition of the Green Cover Podcast, Keith brings on his son and Green Cover Sales Manager, Jakin Berns, and nephew and Operations Manager, Travis Berns to have a conversation about their experiences of working and growing within the family business. The three share about the importance of family values, stewardship, and how these values are shared and overlap with our...