Selecting and Establishing Cover Crops - Rodney Rulon

what I'm going to give you today is my perspective as a central Indiana farmer I'm not gonna say it applies anywhere beyond our farm gate but it has worked for some other people that I've talked to but basically just talk about what we do and what works and I think you're going to find for the most part the logic that we use and the things that work are very much in agreement with what Eileen has seen it produce so to start that I'm just going to get my my biases and background out of the way I think that's a good good way to start so that we all understand kind of where we're coming from so so you know our goal as a long-term no-till farm is to have a farm that's productive and sustainable we're fourth generation at this point continuing fifth generation coming on so we want to want this farm to be around for a long time we are north central Indiana just 20 miles north of where you're at right here so certainly if you came in from the north by Road you you saw so probably some area very close to where we farm so just just up us 31 but we've been no tilling since 1989 we're mostly a corn main rotation we generally have some corn after corn whether it's evening out fields we do we do some plots where we have continuous corn after corn versus just changing some fields around things like this we always have some we're about 15 years into cover crops I can't remember exactly the the first year that we tried cover crops but we're 15 years in on this run we're maybe closer to 50 or 60 or 70 years have on grandpa's round if you go back to the first time you know that there were cover crops on on this land so certainly if something's been around for a long time we do have a hog farm so we have 320 acres a liquid hog manure I just want we'll address that as we go through we do a 1 Acre grid fertility management VRT everything we do is fairly intensive cover crops the the point here is and what I'm going to go through in this first couple slides here is just cover crops are part of a system for us and I think that's the really important thing I want to impress today is how to make cover crops fit into your system so I think that's very important we do believe that conservation is the best economic model we're accountable for what leaves our farm we are directly north of the Morris reservoir if you're familiar with the area but anyway part of the Indianapolis drinking water supply which they are actually currently spending twenty years and three million dollars to dredge that reservoir to get the soil out that has inadvertently gotten there mostly due to tillage so we have a responsibility we believe to be able to go out into the community and say you know we're doing our job to keep the water clean keep the nutrients out and we believe that going forward there's going to be accountability for that as well so we think that's very important so that's that's the introduction and our biases and where we're from you may have heard Kim talk in the last session he's my cousin that I firm with I think even snuck in in the back so but hopefully he tells the same story I do but anyway just a note here and I and I put this on here this is what at one of Kim's sides if he likes sustainability requires carbon capture technology so what that means is turning sunlight into energy we've got solar panels on the farm that turn sunlight into electricity which we can sell to the power company and it's the same idea in the soil we want to turn sunlight into energy in the soil and store carbon in the soil so we're using the cover crop to capture that seven-month brown gap and and take sunlight energy that would otherwise be wasted and put it into energy in the soil for building the soil so a healthy soil is a system like I said that's what we're going to review here real quickly certainly I think the first thing and most important thing for us is that it's a no-till system which involves you know all the aspects of no-till water infiltration improving organic matter all those sorts of things cover crops are part of that system you know so building soil carbon drain into all these things we're gonna go through a couple slides here that just talk about what what I think are the most important parts of the system and for us if any part of this you know Dan dam talked this morning and the general session about the legs of the stool and needing all of those to be there well these are all parts of the system that to make the cover crop part of the system work I think are are all critical so so for us if we can achieve this goal of healthy soil number one like Eileen said agree and I'm gonna agree with Perdue the the the bottom line is we want to increase yields we want we want more bushels you know better economics on the farm so increase yield is is the top goal there but along the way that healthy soil is also going to give us better soil biology nutrient cycling and efficiency and drought tolerance which is going to lead to better economics healthier crops you know increased water infiltration better plant health improve structure and economics so those are all positives that you've heard about all day today from the use of cover crops and all different soil health practices so the so the first part of this the first leg on this this stool for our farm is continuous no-till not rotational we've got to eliminate all catastrophic tillage events and then we do consider a tillage event catastrophic on our farm I can I think safely say that here most places I say that I duck after I say it but we we do we do believe that every time we have to do tillage for some reason it sets our system back it's a negative it does not produce more yield it does not improve anything about the system when we do it it's because we have something we need to correct and we try to do it as seldom as possible usually it's after we've done some drainage work or something like that we just need to to level the soil so we can farm it efficiently so certainly you want that no tilt to improve the soil structure drainage for us i don't think here in central Indiana I know other places in the world where you don't get as much rain falling thing so you can talk about using cover crops and not talk about drainage for us here I can't really talk about using cover crops without talking about having proper drainage whether it's surface drainage subsurface drainage proper air and water mix and structure in the soil at least at a base level because if I do not have those things right I can't get a proper establishment of the cover crop I don't get good rooting you know well so so if we don't correct some of these basic things parts of the system we don't get what we need to get out of the cover crop and out of the no-till so certainly we have our own drainage business have for many years and do a lot of drainage work on our farm as well as all neighbors which side benefit of that is we get to go on a lot of neighbors farms and and dig soul pits they call them tile connections we call them soil pits and see a lot of what's going on under all sorts of different management and it's quite interesting we've been doing that the last week on some custom work and and all I will say there is the the difference between conventional tillage and no-till is significant and the no-till soil structure the color and tilth and health lassalle's significantly better so nice to get a chance to see that again I mentioned already that we do want a cure grid fertility variable-rate we like to make sure we've got if you're going to use cover crops in no-till to build soil structure you need to have adequate calcium and other nutrients there to accomplish that so you need to minimize soil disturbance I went out the two pictures so we've got our nitrogen applicator as well as our manure applicator pictured there the two pictures of the growing cover crop I went out and took yesterday those are actually that's very hard to tell in the top picture you can see the curves a little bit where they turned but those those have actually had hog manure incorporated into that cover crop just about a week ago so growing cover crop hog manure incorporated five inches under the soil surface and that's what it looks like just less than a week later so you're able to do that go ahead and get the cover crop established we use that bar there with the Dietrich sweeps and a dragline are actually able to incorporate liquid hog manure into a growing cover crop cover crop roots immediately interact with the nitrogen of nutrients and manure store that for the next crop tremendously valuable system for us where we have animal manures to use so so once we've got you know low disturbance technology and minimize compaction and got the drainage right and got the no-tell working right now we're ready to talk about cover crops so that's really what he came here to hear so um sorry so really for us that was 15 years ago we had been working really hard at this no-till system and figuring out all these different pieces of the puzzle and how to make everything work and we reached this point where we started realizing that there was more to it than just the physical and just the chemical we needed to do things earthworms from Eileen's old talks about earthworms years ago really hit home and and going probably eighteen years ago going to a no-till conference talking to a gentleman about earthworms and and how to stimulate those and he said you know I always plant an oak cover crop and the earthworms just love it I knew this guy was at the time you know 70 80 years old and he'd been doing this his whole life and he said you just can't believe what it does and the earthworms love it and I said well we like worms they're doing our tillage for us we don't want to do tillage we'll let them do it so let's try feeding the worms see if we can get more worms and and by golly that was the beginning of this 15 year journey that we've been on that we're kind of talking about now on the things that we've learned but certainly feeding that biology with the cover crops building the organic matters what we're looking to do as the next step in the system so once once we've got a no-till system estab then we look at it as our next step so for us once we first started to see the benefits I kind of identified some things that we wanted I noticed right away we were trying different cover crops because at that point 15 years ago we really didn't know what was going to work and what it would do in the soil and things like that so I kind of identified different farms and different things that we would like to address that maybe we were addressing with steel or chemically or other ways very much like Eileen said you know we've got this this laundry list of things that we want to do with cover crops that's going to kind of dictate the cover crops that we're going to use so obviously we want to remove compaction without tillage so so the radish made a lot of sense for that we want to transition from tillage in the no-till so maybe we need a ride that has a little more biomass and those kind of things to help start building that organic matter and we want to get a rotational advantage so we need to throw something different in there maybe the Brassica or a leg Hume somewhere different in the mix to get a rotational advantage you know - we want to boost that biology and that soul full quality we want to trap the nitrogen like I talked about from the manure or just the carryover leftover from the corn crop erosion control I'm going to show a couple pictures that we wear on flatlands here basically is what we're told and when we don't have erosion but I've got a couple pictures coming up that'll that'll maybe dispel that myth we want to break the where we have corn after corn we always want to have a cover crop there to help break that disease cycle you know kind of trick-trick those bugs into thinking there's something else going on there it went certainly nutrients are expensive and we're trying to cycle those and hold on um we want to build organic matter and you know the last one there like I said in the opening grandpa used cover crops he was a pretty smart guy we're still living off a lot of the benefits and things that he did and and so maybe it was something at this point that we needed to look at and try and figure out why it was that he was spending the time of the money to do that so so those were kind of our reasons for for looking cover crops this is what I was talking about the the example we don't have erosion this isn't Eileen's plot on our farm and so I'm gonna blame it on her I actually get the question every year from the guys at this point do we have to keep leaving the no cover crop strip right so it's just getting to the point where everybody's tired of looking at it but what you can see up here is left of the screen we've got our no cover crop strip and in a half mile long field you can see it's basically flat but there's water movement across that field this is in January you know grounds a little stiff and and we get a rainfall in the waters moving across the top you can see the water moving and carrying soil in that bean stubble on the Left that's a Cyril rye cover crop in January not terribly big it's our you know been frozen back but it's there it established bottom right you can see where that's where that the topography forced that water to come over and cross onto that schwarzer I cover crop and what you'll actually see there is within 60 feet we've gone from dirty milky water carrying soil and nutrients all deposited into that swirl right cover crop and clean water coming off the other side of that strip so certainly even in flatland shows the the benefit to having the cover crop to keep the nutrients even if it's just in place within the field this may not have left the field but it wasn't where we put it anymore which to me is erosion if it doesn't if we put if we go to this trouble to have one acre grids and put our fertilizer where we want it and then it washes to a different part of the field then it's no longer where I wanted it and I've got the risk to lose it so I want to avoid that so certainly that's a great example this was a good example I got this spring one of our neighbors that says he doesn't have erosion I think he does he was actually out this fall after harvest I hear with a with a dozer and a pan at the bottom end of this waterway collecting the dirt and bringing it back up to the tops he's free cycling's but anyway so that that is certainly something that happens you can see the the bottom left picture there is a similar situation water coming across one of our fields on a cover crop that's established in the spring and just yeah water is leaving the field it's clean clear nothing in it certainly what we're looking to see Aileen mentioned wind erosion so we don't have wind erosion in our area but we do especially around springtime when tillage so this this is one of those bad cases where we had to do some tillage to level a couple of tile runs that we would put in so the two pictures you're looking at there are the same day same field same wind conditions everything the same the only difference is we've got a civil right cover crop that's been killed on the bottom absolutely no dust no soil leaving the farm just a huge plume of dust where we've just done a single pass with a field cultivator to try and smooth out those Tower rims that we put in and that's the difference in a single pass of how much how much nutrients and and soil that we're blowing away in that one pass and across the road onto the neighbor or further so that means said that's why we use cover crops on our farm I certainly think if you're going to look into cover crops on your farm or advise somebody that's looking at cover crops on their farm you need to identify what that goal is and it may not be the same on every field may not be the same every year may not be the same after every crop but you know are you gonna try and remove compaction do you want something that's easy to manage to start out with like Aileen was talking about do you want to control and break that disease cycle are you looking to scavenge you look into control erosion or work on those rotations or any of the other reasons but certainly I think it's important to identify because that's going to really dictate what you choose as a cover crop on your farm you know you can see the difference there between a Brassica and certainly the the penetration that it's doing and more of a grass that's got the fibrous root so two totally different rude types to different outcomes and you know maybe you want them both together maybe you specifically want one so on our farm we were led to these are the things that we're currently using on our farm to one degree or another certainly sir rye annual ryegrass oats radish clover rape barley Austrian peas vexed and mixes of all of the above in one form or another so those those are the things I'm familiar with that we've been able to work with and make work here in central Indiana and a corn soybean rotation this I always get the question so we'll just throw it out there if you want to take a picture of it then more than welcome to this this is our fall 2017 mixes going to crops in the spring of 18 so the top two mixes in the center they're going to be are going to corn and eight-teen so this would be soybean stubble going to be no tilled into corn the first mix is our first and I'll mention I was going to insulator but we were very specific about variety selection hybrid selection as part of our cover crop program in our cash crop so we try and as much as we can push maturities earlier we do so that we can get out there and get that cover crop established and growing for us we grow a lot of to five a lot of to seven soybeans so we can get those off in September and get an establishment of the cover crops what we found in this system is that is not an issue on yield they always yield just as well if not better than our than our group three beans in this system we're we're we're we're mitigating soil temperature and holding on to moisture the shorter season beans do just fine similar situation with corn but that so that being said we try and get out there and get these planted as quick as we can but our so our our primary first mix that we're going to plant on soybean stubble that's going to go to corn next year is going to be oats radish rape and krinsman clover that is a great mix you can see the top right photo there that is what remains in the spring which is rape and crimson clover not bad to plant into a beautiful you can see the bottom right picture there a beautiful till these'd bed with all of those fibrous roots growing through the winter with the radish and the oats having died down in the winter time you're left with a fairly sparse there's still a lot of roots that are holding the soil and taking care of the erosion but it's a fairly easy there's not a lot of top growth to plant through doesn't create a lot of problems easy to kill so super happy with that mix you've got in the earlier planted stuff the clover generally will go ahead and Nadja late and make some nitrogen we don't usually count on it because where we're at and as late as we're playing the clover it's not going to be consistent across the field and honestly when Ilene talked about needing nitrogen in the bank our goal with the cover crops just a build soil organic matter build soil health we want to deposit that nitrogen that we're either able to scavenge or create with the cover crops into the soil to build organic matter it takes a lot of nitrogen to build organic matter if we rob it back out of the soil by shorting ourselves on our nitrogen recommendations we're going to limit ourselves on how much organic matter we can build in the soil so our goal there is not to is not to steal that nitrogen back out it's to leave that to build the organic matter soybeans our group three late group three soybeans that come off obviously we're getting too late for some of those things in that first mix so we're gonna go to a half rate of Cyril rye still fairly thin come springtime easy to plant in 215 pounds 15 pounds of oat that's going to winter kill and three pounds of rape but at that time of year is probably going to survive the winter but not always so so we're gonna have 15 pounds of Cyril rye come spring for sure and maybe some rape out there still pretty easy mix to plan into does a nice job of holding the soil so going to soybeans so in corn stocks we actually and I'll show some pictures later if we get time we're trying to we used to do so around everything we're trying to split that up a little bit now we're having some issues with voles and things like that and the early planets alright gets so big and so aggressive that we're trying on our early harvested corn this mix with oats radish and rape similar to what we're doing without the clover similar to what we're doing ahead of the corn and we've had real good preliminary results on that when we tried it last year and then as it gets later and we can't plant anything else than we're going to a fairly found 35 pounds of Steel right drilled so cost on those you can snap another picture that I don't think we have time today I won't have time today to talk too much about cost but suffice it to say we're gonna be talking $14.50 an acre average for our mixes across the board some are a little more some are a little less but that's about our cost per acre for seed it's going to cost another $12 an acre for labor or fuel tractor hours repairs all of those things so you're going to be at 26 27 dollars per acre for your cover crop drilled and that's about where we're at on it so and if you're wondering we did plant 5,200 acres and that was all drilled after harvest with a 40-foot drill so if anybody wants to drive a drill part-time you're welcome come on over cuz that's it was something like 300 hours of tractor hours on the drill this year so certainly that's a challenge and a reason that as we look at planting methods I don't recommend that show that everybody do it all with the drill planting dates that kind of go along with those things that I said we use obviously if you've got wheat your crops coming off in the summer so you know the first week of August you can plant all sorts of things you've got opportunities to plant you know summer mixes that we just don't use you know sorghum Sudan all sorts of really neat mixes that will do a lot of things and build a lot of organic matter that's not we don't have wheat so that's not something we normally do so these are kind of end dates for me I will push them a little bit but in general September 15th if I haven't got Austrian peas planted by September 15th then they're probably not gonna make it through the winter they're fairly expensive and it's kind of hard to justify so if we've got a year where we got where we know we got early beans planted early it's been a hot summer we're probably going to get a week or so prior to that where we can get some planted then we'll go ahead and get some Austrian peas if not this year we didn't start really harvesting until the 20th of September no Austrian peas this year so October 1st is where I would like to have the cutoff for oats radish and clover they seem to do if you can get them ahead of October 1st almost always be successful I'll usually push it that first week of October depending on the weather sometimes they get enough growth to feel like it's worth it sometimes they don't but October 1st is usually a pretty safe date October 21st so three weeks into October in our area I find annual ryegrass that's about the end of what I would like to plan it to keep it from winter killing out and the rapeseed as well those both are pretty good up till then sell rye I said November 10th I needed a date I've often told guys you can plant it on Christmas if you want to get out of the house I think it seems like it goes no matter what we actually just finished planning so rye on the last day of November so that was the last that we planted this year I may germinate this winter may not germinate till spring it'll grow fast enough in the spring that we'll get our benefit out of it so obviously not ideal but we had it in the shed and it's better to have it out there than in the sheds so so but again I got a note there cornu soybean maturities matter when you're trying to hit these kind of timeframes so I think it's important to select maturities even if you're going to use aerial application or some sort of spreader or surface application in it's important when those crops are going to come off and mature so you start getting daylight to the ground to help them grow so certainly shorter maturities are better planting methods we've got a few slides here certainly I call all forms of aerial and surface application so I don't care if it's an airplane a spreader highboy with a cedar on it a corn head with a cedar on it what it whatever it is if you're spreading seed on top of the ground that's a that's an aerial or surface application we have vertical tilt machines which are somewhere in between some of the seeds on top of the ground some of the seed falls down on the dirt some of it gets covered up those are depending on moisture conditions can fall one way or the other more towards aerial application or more towards drill just depending on what the what the weather is like no-till drill obviously is is my favorite the precision planner we used for years and certainly I'll talk about that and we had great luck with that let's just go through real quick so you see different results from different planting methods you know the nice singulate from the precision planner the nice total coverage that you get with the aerial application you know rows with good growth where you drill so a lot of different things going on there precision planner like I said was really where we got started on a large scale we were able to take our soybean planter with split rows set it up with some small hoppers so that we could run one row off of the central fill with like rye or oats or something like that and then the row in between we would run clover radish those kinds of things the one downside and all two downsides for us on the precision planer one was cost that's a very expensive planner to be dragging over the acres in the fall so if we were only doing a couple hundred acres of cover crops or a thousand acres of cover crops that was okay but as we started trying to do more and more it was a lot of wear and tear on the equipment so that began to be a concern that we were spending too much using two too expensive of piece of equipment for that job so that was really the end reason we got away from it all so the row spacing 15 inches is not bad but ideally I'd like to have my plants a little bit closer together the nice thing is that that row spacing with the precision placement you can get by with the lowest rates and the lowest cost of any of the seeding methods that we're going to look at so so dollar for dollar certainly it's a cover crop on for the least number of dollars that you're going to be able to do it and you certainly want to be careful not to over seed when you're using 15 inch rows and a precision planner because if you get to if you're in row spacing is too tight you'll just get top growth with very little root growth and that's not what you want but certainly a good way to go one thing that is difficult is if you're trying to do mixes especially you know pre bought you know package mixes that have small and large seed in them where you're working with plates like this on a precision planter it's hard to get a plate that will necessarily work with different seed sizes so that would be why we split the split the rows and could use one plate type on small seeds and one plate type on the larger ones I put the note rail drill in the vertical till together those are both messages to put the seed into the soil I think really the key there is seed to soil contact obviously I'm gonna lean towards the no-till drill is going to be more consistent and better at doing that but they are both trying to put the seed into the soil but certainly you can plant the latest with this may be similar to precision planting I guess but anything that's going to lock that seed into the soil get it growing just as quickly as possible that lets you push your planting dates the latest which is a benefit again fairly low cost on seed not quite as low as the precision planner because your row spacing is generally tighter but certainly less seed required than your aerial or surface applications and you can do a lot of things there so I'm a big fan of the drill I tell people you know if if you're just going to start out and try it and you want to be successful the drills the way to go because you know what you're gonna get put it in the soil it's going to grow and you don't have to worry about whether it rains doesn't rain those kind of things so aerial and surface applications certainly if timing is is appropriate I think they work really well the thing you have to watch out for is that you need more time so your aerial window is going to be pushed forward so you need to start your air where I was saying September 15th that's maybe two or three weeks earlier so late August is where that same time frame is going to be with your aerial application because your seat is on top you've got to get enough moisture to get it to germinate and get a root down into the soil you're just going to be a slower establishment with the with the surface applications probably going to need to have a little bit higher seeding rate partially just because your plant to plant spacing when you're full coverage it's you're gonna get a better coverage if you have a few more seeds out there but also you're gonna have some losses insects and all sorts of things when that stuff is laying on top so certainly if we're going to cover the entire Midwest with cover crops I think we're gonna have to use surface application because we're gonna have to do stuff in crop to get that done so I'm certainly not against it it's it's my second choice if I have a choice but when you need to get things done it's certainly especially if you're short on Labor need to get things planted dirt you know ahead of harvest or you know you don't have the extra labor during harvest to get it done or you don't have a drill certainly an effective way to get it done this is just an example here of aerial versus am I done a little bit over we're getting there so aerial versus that these are all aerial applications you'll see you get a little bit more spindly when you throw it on top of the ground as opposed to the same mix planted with a drill is going to tend to I think the tap roots tend to grow a little bit more vigorously when they're put into the soil which you would expect grasses so rye oats annual rye thrown on top the ground which you generally would plant fairly shallow anyway tend to do really well the fibrous roots the taproot more expensive seed I like to put into the ground so certainly if you're going to have mixes you want to think about how you put that mix together you want to have varying root types so you can get the benefit of fibrous roots as well as tap roots you want to have growth rates that you don't want to have a lot of something in the mix that's going to shade everything else out so be careful with your mixes if your custom coming up with this magic mix that you like if you've got a whole bunch of kale in there that's going to have a great big leaf and and shadow everything else out and that's the mess going to be a problem of course you've got to think about how you're going to plant it when you're going to plant it you know what your goal is if you're trying to scavenge or or make nitrogen build organic matter you know certainly by having mixes you can improve winter survival I've seen that with a lot of the things that we plant something like oats as a cover in the fall can kind of foster through some of those Frost's and things that may take out some of the more sensitive seedlings and give them a chance to get established so I really like that the last thing to think about on a mix is to think about how you're going to terminate it before you put things in the mix if you're going to have annual ryegrass that you're concerned and you don't want to let it get away from you so you're gonna try and kill it but you've got a leg um that you were really wanting to let grow until June to produce nitrogen you're really gonna have to be really selective with your chemicals or you're gonna have you're gonna end up wiping out the money you spend on the leggy and when you try and go out there with roundup and kill your anti grass so so think about what's in the mix and how you're going to terminate make sure that you know your goals for but for all the products in the mix kind of line up with how you're going to terminate them certainly you want a quality seed source you got to think about how you're going to blend it and deliver it termination eriell misapplication obviously it's not most of the pilots now have got enough experience they're getting pretty good but we can have issues with gates and things like that you need to know if you've got people around you that grow wheat and you're gonna fly on sorrel rye those two do not go well together if your neighbors get their field rejected they're not gonna be happy about it if you dribble dribble sir all right into their wheat field so those kind of things certainly real quick there you know this is a great example here we saw this again just yesterday when I was out digging this this particular picture is a couple of years old but in the fall right now at this time we've got 40 plus inches worth of root growth out of that mix that I drilled in September and October even fairly small top growth on the oats and the rape and we're getting roots down easily to 40 inches and they're growing I mean it's you can see them they're growing around the tile they're not causing any problem in that in that old clay tile that we broke into there you can see the tile line that maybe hooked to something coming from that house you know see it scavenging the nitrogen there which is a good thing right that's what they're supposed to be doing so we're capturing that keeping it out of the out of the water and so that so that's all good obviously there are situations that I've heard about and we've had maybe one or two situations on our farm over the years where we had something generally on our farm at least we've had something wrong with a tile system either a tile that was flat or had a belly in it and as those roots start to decay and break off they can collect in that you know if there's something a connection there that may be causing them to start collecting that's been our experience I've heard all different stories if you have tile that you think you have issues with or you have a soil type where you believe you could have issues I recommend watching your planning date so that your cover crop doesn't get to rate too big your seeding rate so that it's not too thick and possibly staying away from some things like Cirro rye where you're concerned about that type of root grow those are all things that I know Purdue has publications out about and there's it's things that we're learning we have not seen with thousands and thousands of thousands a cursive cover crop on pattern tiled fields we've not had much problem but obviously in certain situations I know that it can be somewhat a thing there with the voles this is our plot again with Eileen on all the bad stuff I think it is related to the plot with Eileen yeah but you know you can see here where we have some bull pressure on that aerial photo now we've got annual rye grass so rye and oats and radish the interesting thing is the oats and radish has less vole pressure than even the no cover which is one of the reasons when I talked earlier about the fact that we were going to start rotating and oat and radish mix through some of our a KERS of corn stalks to try and help work on this volt population problem try and starve them out a little bit basically every couple years instead of giving them Cyril ready to live on every other year this particular case we keep the same cover in the same place for over thirteen years now so it's a worst-case scenario but but it's a interesting to see how the different cover crops are leading to different growth rates and those in those populations those voles are just looking for something to eat over the winter time obviously this is what we're looking for healthy soil good root growth good organic matter you know no layers going down we got night crawlers hanging out the the sidewalls there and roots now in sixty inches deep at that point and that's that's a Christmas time photo there and I just think that that's what we should be looking to get you know that nice you can see there what that's that's tile plow has run through there and instead of big blocky chunky nasty pieces of soil we're getting nice till thise hole that just has structure and crumbles certainly what we're looking for so that's kind of our goal so with all of this that's our goal that we have in mind and you

Channel: SARE Outreach

Views: 13,232

Rating: 4.8632479 out of 5

Keywords: cover crop, cover crops, crop diversification, soil, soil quality, soil health, soil management, soil conservation, soybeans, corn, SARE, SARE Outreach, research and education, agriculture, sustainable, sustainable agriculture, farming, farm, research grants, ag, sustainable ag, organic, local food, USDA, stewardship, on farm research, choosing cover crops, selecting cover crops, establishing cover crops, benefits of cover crops

Id: B0vMd1SlDAo

Length: 40min 17sec (2417 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2018