No-Till Cover Crop Termination for Small Scale Agriculture

[Music] [Applause] hey you all farmer jesse here as promised i'm going to do a cover crop termination video right now because as we all know or as we are so often told well executed cover crops are absolutely incredible for soil health honestly there's really no debate there not in the research not in my experience and not in the experience of others few things really amplify soil health quite like cover crops and simultaneously and respectfully they can be superbly obnoxious to manage so today i'm going to really dive into small scale no-till cover crop termination and i'm not really going to hold back i love cover crops but certain aspects have been neglected by the popular literature and others have been at least in my experience a bit oversold so it's early i'm getting rained on let's kill some freaking cover crops i feel like i'm feeling a little ornery this morning for 6 a.m [Music] [Applause] first things first if you're not subscribed to this channel make sure to hit the subscribe button and if you are subscribed you're awesome and if you gain something from this video or any of our videos you can always support our work at patreon.com no-till growers or pick up a copy of my book the living soil handbook at no tillgrowers.com specifically where the proceeds go to making you more content like this and also where i discuss cover crops in greater detail than i ever could in a youtube video yep okay so as i mentioned at the top cover crops are incredible soil enhancers but one of the big challenges growers face in realizing those benefits is how to get rid of the cover crops when you need to get plants in the ground but in this video we're going to go beyond just crimping because honestly i don't know that crimping alone especially on our scale is necessarily the best option for most people for that reason i'm also going to posit some ideas for tools or techniques that may be more effective than crimping with a little engineering one obligatory note here this video is mostly going to deal with rye cover crops because it is currently late may and that's what i'm dealing with but there is some crossover with summer cover crops like sorghum sudan and sun hemp and so on um so essentially we're talking grains plus things like vetch and maybe austrian winter peas or something like that the hardy overwintered hard to kill stuff because many software legumes like field peas and beans and buckwheat bro [Music] because many softer legumes like field peas and beans and buckwheat are fairly easy to kill with say a mower or a few hard frosts the hardier stuff however are a bit more complicated so they need a little bit more fleshing out for the first method i'm going to tackle the easy one crimping then tarping on a very large scale this is not going to be super applicable to you because you would need massive tarps though it is possible you could use black plastic or landscape fabric not ideal in my opinion as a lot of work and a lot of plastic but technically possible anyway the idea here is that you stomp the cover crop to the ground around milk stage and place a plastic opaque tarp over top to kill it milk stage is not a requisite with tarps but it will speed things up so milk staging grains real quick the three stages you need to know really are flowering when you see little yellow flowers in the seed head then when the kernels fill up and you can press a little liquid out of the kernels that's milk stage if that liquid is a little doughy that's called dough stage which is fine too but that's that is like the third and sort of last step before grain stage meaning weed seeds so kill it before the weed stage what that's what i call it which would be you know your milk stage or your dough stage milk stage is about a week or two window though again that doesn't matter quite as much for the tarping method or of termination but it will for others that we will discuss in a minute and it helps for termination in general so for the tarping method you smash the cover crop to the ground and cover it with a tarp for several weeks until terminated and then you transplant into that mulch that's pretty much it it's pretty straightforward and shout out to daniel mays of frith farm for all his work on this uh his book is really excellent you should check that out now one thing i've been doing is trying to figure out what the best method for crimping is because although i like the stomp method and it is very effective it's no small amount of labor excellent cardio workout but on hot days here in kentucky it can be a lot to ask of our employee greg so with the tools i already own i've been trying to speed up that process a little bit and reduce the wear on the person crimping so in this patch here i tested four different methods stomp crimping rolling over the cover crop with a mower but not mowing rolling over with a heavier implement called the power harrow but without the pto engaged and then rolling over with the power harrow with the pto engaged and the tying several inches above the soil i don't know what to call this last method with the power harrow set high with the tines actually spinning maybe clobbering because it basically beats the tar out of the cover crop and kind of scatters it that said it is far and away my favorite of the methods that we've used here and has been for many years it's the most effective it's the fastest and the least labor though it does require a bcs and a power hero which i would not just buy for this purpose alone so it's not a method for everyone a board and some rope is much more affordable but since i already own the power harrow and i never use it enough and it's getting and it's heavy as i'll get out i've started to test to see what else i can do with it and this sort of clobbering thing has been great though i will say the roller sometimes gets clogged with um grass and if you have the tines set too low they also will get clogged anyway more on that idea of clobbering in a minute no matter what you use in this sort of tarping method you need the cover crop to be as flat as possible against the soil if the tarp is elevated at all like if the cover crop is lifting it up it'll be less effective the next step once the cover crop is down is to cover it with the tarp for at least two hot weeks preferably a third if you can swing it maybe more i'm just going to power through this right clear plastic can work as well and perhaps a bit faster but you want to leave it on for at least one hot week some limited studies have shown deleterious effects on soil life after like 14 days of solarizing so just keep that in mind however if you have some old high tunnel plastic laying around solarization could be a good second life for it anyway when we pulled the tarp back every method was used for crimping was technically fine they all worked the only real difference was some were less flat against the soil than others clobbering was the closest to the soil stomping was sort of the second closest and then the rest but we agreed that the we liked the look of the clobbered the most it was the flattest against the soil and was the most spread out so we just went back and over everything for a little uniformity's sake with the power hero and again it was power hair was very up high and we had the tines spinning and then we transplanted our mid-summer tomatoes into that so that's the method that's method number one one notable additional trial that we threw in there because i guess i just can't help myself was that we added partially decomposed wood chips over a bed that we tarped and interestingly the rye is coming back through that now quite vigorously the mulch didn't decompose the rye as i had hypothesized it protected it from the tarp we add compost mulches after tarping sometimes but i thought this was worth a trial as well and perhaps that is a good segue to editorialize for a second because the sort of weed suppressing mulch effects of cover crops is maybe a bit oversold sometimes now it's oversold not as much by the farmers perhaps but by the researchers and organizations most enthusiastic about cover cropping what isn't often highlighted is that the true mulching effect in a large percentage of cases requires just some addition of some sort something other than the cover crop and a cremper for larger scale conventional growers it may be a small amount of herbicide at termination or some heavy tillage on a small scale you know organic no-till scale it's a tarp for several weeks that will kill the cover crop as well as surface weeds or it's supplementary mulches like straw or compost or it's some combination of those things like in order for weeds to not become a factor after the cover crop is terminated there generally has to be some additional support in every cover crop trial i've had regardless of density this may also be true because here in kentucky zone 6b we are semi-subtropical so humid and hot and organic matter breaks down very quickly here this even further reduces an already light mulching effect so we often supplement with something like hey like i mentioned or compost now that isn't a bad thing that's just an understated thing that is it's just something that i want people interested in using cover crops to understand especially in warmer climates and not necessarily going to be all the mulch you need and a crimper alone may not be enough i i recommend watching this video as well as i talk about cover crop management strategies and things not to do which will help of course if you have a really clean slate before laying your cover crops down a thin mulch should be fine so that is to say just a cover crop mulch should be fine most of us though especially with long growing seasons will need not only something else to kill the cover crop but something further to assist in the weed suppression effect mulches like hay straw compost etc so just keep that in mind and i should just say that if you have great strategies for no or low till cover crop termination put them in the comments section as always i do not have a monopoly on all the best advice or best experience so lend us your brain you know for science sort of okay so that crimp and tarp method is very easy and very straightforward and but could this be done without the tarp on a small scale well i have a few methods i've been working on and will certainly have different levels of efficacy depending on where you are and your tools but i thought it could be interesting to share them in that way if you're interested or if you have the tools you can trial it trial it very small but trial it on your own farm and tell me what you think oh and i should know someone will probably ask about the crimper that goes with the bcs i have not yet tried it but have heard mostly sort of matte results a lot of us are working on permanent semi-raised beds so it's tough to crimp the edges with something like that and it is a little unwieldy to drag around i hear uh let us know if you've had good experience with that particular tool though i don't want to dis it too hard without having actually used it myself it's not very good practice i have been experimenting with the clobber method i really have no idea what to actually call that without tarping as described earlier with the power hero raised up running the idea is that we clobber the cover crop fully at milk state and then just plant into that i like the clobber method because like the crimping method it sort of pinches the stem so the plant can't transport nutrients to the xylem and phloem but it pinches not just the top stems like crimping sometimes does but nearly all of the stems because it's sort of stirring and crimping all at the same time again i will still need some supplementary mulch to get the you know thorough mulch effect but i do see some potential here in clobbering cover crops rather than crimping them or clobbering while crimping perhaps i am clearly using a tool designed for soil work to kill the cover crop and it is therefore imperfect like don't go run out and buy a power harrow but perhaps there is a nugget of an idea here where instead of simply pressing the cover crop to the ground with a crimper and the chevron design chevron design just being like that little design you see there on the crimper uh we could beat it up a little bit to increase termination results and perhaps scatter the cover crop for a better weed suppression i don't think the power hero is necessarily the best design for that result but perhaps it's a good starting point i've tried the flame weeder and it doesn't quite penetrate deep enough but what about something like a steam weeder um hell i recently discovered braided landscapes is there an idea and you should google it because it's fascinating but is there an idea uh for a machine that could braid rows for cover crops my point only being have we fully explored the world of cover crop termination without tillage yet like fully exploded i'm not convinced [Music] one way that we've been having success in killing cover crops for quite a while is simply mowing it with the flail mower we set our flail mower really low we make it so it hits right at the surface so we make a high pass just to chop it down a little bit and then a low pass to kind of finish it off this requires a fairly high powered mower in our case a 13 horsepower bcs but essentially we mow the cover crop down around milk stage you could also use a scythe or a sickle bar mower or whatever you have as long as you are fully at that milk stage then we wait a week and we mow it again we lose a lot of mulching effect here but the mulch is maybe the fourth best reason to grow cover crops anyway i feel like i'm about to get rained out the soil organic matter the nutrient gathering the increasing of soil respiration those are all way ahead of the mulch factor in my opinion weeds are the major issue here when talking about mowing because the rye vetch and crimson clover will mostly die though maybe you will have to pick out some rye later but any extra weeds will fill in after the cover crop is down so you could either add an additional mulch or do some of the lower till management techniques that we've been playing with to explain we have this area where i've been trying to establish chamomile in the pathways which smells amazing by the way watch this video for more on that but the reason that i want that i don't want to tarp the whole area it would simply kill all those chamomile pathways which i love this was kind of by design i wanted to force myself to come up with some new ways to terminate cover crops without tillage or in this case with very minimal disturbance so what we did here was mow as i just described with the flail mower then rake the mulch off because it's not that useful to us in this particular situation then lightly power harrowed the surface to kill any germinating weeds then we picked out what weeds or rye that we missed i'm gonna get through this video wet or not alive those are kind of the same thing um lightly raked it again and then planted the lettuce note here that the power hero is only going down far enough to kill any like germinating weeds not down to the root zone where the greatest sort of microbial populations and soil structure reside that's a very important note all the cover crop roots are left intact think of it like a very heavy raking it's a little bit intensive but the soil which was notably very poorly drained deep compost beds last year is vastly improved also an early cover crop termination version of this mowing technique was what we did for our sweet potatoes essentially we mowed the rye early early early and then use the rotary plow this is what it's like to live in kentucky it's just like just gonna rain for a while on and off all the time yep essentially we mowed the rye early before it was flowering then we used the rotary plow hilariously wet all right sorry for the rain noise we're just going to knock this out just the rotary plow to raise our pathways into our beds thus throwing the path soil onto the mode cover crop we then tarped to kill any newly revealed weeds pull back the tarps and we will shove the sweet potatoes in so that's another technique i think there's a lot of potential for no and low till cover crop techniques out there i could probably do 10 videos on this subject but it's raining for now you know let me know any questions that you have or anything i missed in the comments section what are some things you found that work for cover crops in this sort of soil health focused approach snag a copy of the book the living soil handbook from notegrowers.com where the proceeds go to making you more rainy content like this um like this video if you liked this video make sure you're subscribed to this channel if you want to be awesome thanks for watching we'll see you next week maybe bye 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Channel: No-Till Growers

Views: 122,137

Keywords: cover crops, killing cover crops, no till, no dig, cover cropping, seeds, drills, regenerative, green manure, how to terminate cover crops, cover crop termination, small scale, agriculture, raised beds, no tillage, no spray, organic farming, low till, no tarp, no plastic, Tarping, occultation

Id: O6-IYSxbbuE

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2022