Soil Health U experts discuss cover crops, healthy soil
Cover crops can play a role in weed control
Can cover crops be part of your weed management program?
Anita Dille, a professor of Weed Ecology at Kansas State University, said the answer is yes. First, however, producers need to set goals for what they want to accomplish with cover crops.
“Then match the cover crops to your goals,” Dille said. “If you want suppression, you want fewer weeds and you want all of those weeds to be smaller. It is easier to control fewer weeds that are small.”
Producers can have a number of goals in mind when they start using cover crops. These include reducing soil erosion, reducing soil compaction, improving soil quality, improving water quality, conserving soil moisture or improving wildlife habitat.
“There are lots of things we can think of, but again it is what are your goals for putting that cover crop out there?” Dille said.
The next question producers need to ask themselves is what are the key weed species they need to control. In order to select the best cover crops it is important to know when these key weed species germinate. Finding the answer to these two questions will help producers decide whether they should plant spring-seeded cover crops or fall-seeded cover crops.
Dille said a helpful guide for selecting the proper cover crops is the Midwest Cover Crops Council website, http://mccc.msu.edu.
Finally, producers need to decide how and when to terminate the cover or even if they want to terminate it at all. Some producers plant right into a standing green cover crop with good results. Before you do anything, however, Dille said to check with your crop insurance provider.
—Doug Rich
Soil health helps the bottom line
Dale Strickler still can see his father holding a ball-peen hammer in the kitchen of their southeast Kansas farm.
The then teenaged Strickler had disked some of the family’s farm ground while it was still wet. It dried out so hard that his father, seeing what his son had done, took a clod from the field, sat it on the dinner table and struck it three times before it broke.
Strickler, the closing keynote speaker at the event sponsored by High Plains Journal, said the experience marked the beginning of his soil health journey.
Strickler, now an agronomist with Green Cover Seed, lives near Jamestown, Kansas, where he runs a cowherd and studies cropping systems using cover crops and grazing to build soil health.
Farmers can afford to regenerate their soil, Strickler said, and should have no excuse when it comes to making changes to their farms. Times are tough, but the perception that taking care of the soil costs a lot of money is false.
“Everything we talk about with soil regeneration is a profitable practice in its own right. That is what I really want to drive home,” he said, adding that rebuilding soil generates profit. “Things like cover crops that can be raised, incorporating perennials into crop rotations, controlling soil erosion—all those things make your farming operation more profitable. They don’t cost you money, they make you money.”
He has the records to prove it.
Using Kansas State University data, Strickler showed how conventional-till farmers with a corn/soybean rotation are losing money. Harvesting a 125-bushel corn crop at $3 a bushel would lose about $90 an acre. Soybeans, he estimated, would lose about $75 an acre.
However, those who implemented a three-year, no-till rotation of corn, soybeans and wheat, along with cover crops and grazing, saw a boost to their bottom line.
He talked about several different covers, including rye and multi-species legume-based covers. Sunn hemp makes a lot of biomass and nitrogen, he said. To get a deeper root zone, grow radishes.
So how does incorporating these things change the economic picture? On corn, Strickler said research shows adding wheat to the corn/soybean rotation and planting corn following a legume cover crop will boost corn yields by 20 percent.
Legumes help reduce nitrogen applications by an average $24 an acre. Other savings comes from replacing tillage with a burndown. That changes the bottom line on corn from a $90 loss to a $31 profit.
By incorporating the three-year rotation, the average return a year is $36.33, compared to the average $82.50 annual loss from planting corn and soybeans with tillage.
“We’re not talking a Bill Gates type of money here,” Strickler said, “but at least your nose is above water now.”
—Amy Bickel
When kept covered, healthy soils stay in place
In nearly 50 years of no-till crop production and 40 years of cover crop adoption, Dave Brandt has learned a thing or two about diverse cover crops and how to manage them.
The Carroll, Ohio, farmer was a keynote speaker at Soil Health U. Brandt said he uses a wide variety of covers from hairy vetch, crimson clover, and cow peas to sunn hemp, sunflowers, and deep-rooted tube radishes to build his soils following a corn-wheat-soybean rotation at a rate of one-half percent per year.
“When you have healthy soil, it looks like cottage cheese—only dark,” Brandt said.
Brandt also uses a crop roller to press down stubble prior to planting. It helps keep soils intact. It helps him reduce his crop protection product use. It also saves fuel.
“The mileage on my tractor on no-till is about 9 gallons per hour,” Brandt said. “I go use the tractor on my father-in-law’s place, with conventional tillage, it’s about 16 to 17 gallons per hour.”
The process led Brandt to have soils that not only stay where they belong, but stay cool in the warm Ohio summers.
“Last year, it was fairly cool, with highs mostly around 90,” Brandt said. “You go out with a temperature probe, and the soils are at 78 degrees. In hot weather, the earthworms and other critters that are beneficial to the soil go dormant. We keep ours active. When it rains, the moisture filters through the residue and we don’t have any soil loss.”
Also not lost are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, since no-till holds those elements, too.
“All you have to do is drive around our area to compare,” Brandt said. “Pass by our farms, my soil is green. It’s brown everywhere else.”
It’s with diverse cover crops combined with no-till that makes Brandt’s operation a thriving one.
“Find something that you aren’t doing,” Brandt said, “and make it work for you.”
—Larry Dreiling
Treat the soil right and it will pay you back
Dan Forgey, Gettysburg, South Dakota, quoted the book “40 Chances,” by Howard Buffett, in emphasizing to farmers that it’s never too late to change.
“You’ve got 40 chances in your lifetime to make a difference,” he said. “That’s 40 cropping seasons. I’ve had 49 years to get this thing right. I did everything I could to destroy our soils and I was good. Embarrassingly good.” That was until the downturn in the farm economy of the 1980s. At that time, farmers had to learn a more economical way of getting more yields from their soils.
Forgey has managed Cronin Farms for 47 of those years. Central to the farm’s success has been an emphasis on keeping as much residue on the field as possible as well as managing their fertilizer placement.
Fertilizer rates and application methods are unique to every farm, but Forgey reminded farmers the symbiotic relationship between the plant and mycorrhizal fungi can be out of balance by applying too much non-organic fertilizer. Not only can this stop the formation of invaluable humus, it can cost the farmer real dollars in fertilizer bills. Managing the soil for better infiltration and worm movement is also important.
“You have to think about what’s growing under the ground,” he said. That should be as much of a driving force as what’s growing on top of the ground, he added.
Managing the farm for improved soil health also means a change in thinking from the short-term to the long-term, Forgey explained. For example, by grazing cover crops the farm can get a return of about $59 per acre and add valuable organic matter to the farm. That organic matter allows them to raise 155-bushel corn on about 19 inches of moisture, and improves the soil health long-term.
“If you farm for maximum profit and not the maximum yield, and by going back to the basics, you can survive in times of low commodity prices,” he said. “If you do things right to the soil, it pays you back.”
—Jennifer M. Latzke
