Given the price of commodities, you probably should keep the cost of cover crop seed to about $15 per acre or less, says Anthony Bly, South Dakota State University Extension soil health specialist.

Bly has seven tips on how to stay in control of cover crop costs:

1. Design your own cover crop mix. Seed companies will mix and bag it to order.

2. Choose species carefully. You will want to know:

• What you want to accomplish with a cover crop. Do you mainly want to control wind and water erosion, dry out the soil in the spring, break up compaction or build soil organic matter? Different species will do different things.

• What is the next cash crop? The sequence will affect which cover crop species will be best. “We usually recommend broadleaf dominant mixes prior to grass crops and vice versa for broadleaf crops,” Bly says. “However, planting all broadleaf cover crops on a lower residue crop will cause residue to disappear. We don’t want this situation it violates many of the soil health principles.”

3. Get as much diversity as possible. “More than six cover crop species is good, but strive for eight to 12,” Bly says.

4. Get cover crop price sheets from seed suppliers and calculate the cost of the seed before ordering. You don’t want any surprises.

5. Make sure you understand how to calculate a seeding rate. If there are 10 species in mix and each is 10% of the mix, then multiply by the full seeding rate of the species by 10% to calculate the rate for each individual species in the mix.

6. Grow some of your own cover crop seed. Let a winter rye cover crop mature, then harvest the grain and save some of the seed for the following year.

7. Keep records on cover crops like you do on cash crops. Some cover crops will do better on some parts of your farm than others. There also might be a site-specific application for cover crops someday, Bly says.