Selecting Cover Crops - Dave Robison

[Music] one thing that we know is is that it takes a lot of research and a lot of time to kind of figure out what works where over the last six years or over the last four or five years I guess placed over 450 cover crop plots in six different states most of these have been small strips some of them have been many acres per strip they're per different product and then we try to do Route pit digs and tried to add a lot of information on what products work well in what areas basically those states would be I didn't include Ontario and that so would be it from Ontario and in the eastern Corn Belt and then up into the Upper Midwest as well so we can get a lot of different opportunities to look at different products and how they work we will let Gail and Keith talk about what happens elsewhere as we go further west when we're looking at different cover crops again producing nitrogen is one of the benefits that we're going to get from that several legumes make good cover crops and again how much nitrogen that they will produce the answer to that is it depends and I get that ask that question often it's like can I stop for putting on nitrogen on my corn no how long have you used cover crops and what is the cover crop you're using and the answer is always no but but still we wanted everyone to have success and not lose yield until you get to the guys that have been doing it 25 30 years and get to that spot one thing we know when we're looking at legume cover crops is we really need to be looking at occu lating our legumes every year I'm strolling with someone from North Carolina just a little while ago and c7 you know we don't need to inoculate our hairy vetch but I'll tell you in the Eastern Corn Belt and when we're planting peas or planting crimson clover planting some different crops that are normally not in a normal corn beam rotation if we don't inoculate them we'll see this type of result here we'll see real nice dark green plants tall lush and then we'll see others that are nice and yellow right beside it and without that growth I'm obviously not doing a lot of fixing of nitrogen this is up in Wisconsin if the Badger plots it's a kind of east of Madison you see here just some of the nod ulation and we were getting on during winter peas and the real key here was was that you know whenever we're putting out anything in plots we make sure folks do that and I always recommend we do it regardless and they're most of the legumes that are sold are pre-inoculated or I should say many of them are but then again some of them especially the peas are normally not sold pre-inoculated so that'll have to be done by the farmer in the box this is just an example of some different to plants they were side by side the guy had knock you lated him in the box and we had almost no inoculant on the pea here on the right and on the left there was good nodulation so that it actually had enough inoculant on that actual pea to help it to annihilate well and you can see the difference in the color there and if you would have seen the whole picture the difference in the height of the peas was just about a foot difference in height and certainly better color and so forth when we're talking about Austrian winter peas this will be one of the key products that can be utilized in many situations especially after wheat or after other cereal grains we really are looking at needing to inoculate this so if we're looking at flying on cover crops or dropping them in with a highboy type cedar this is really not our best option it can work but not as consistently in most areas that generally will winterkill be nice to have five to six weeks of good growth on that to be able to get some decent growth better longer is better with peas and generally for harvesting or grazing we would get one good harvest off of that but we can produce 70 to 135 units of nitrogen with peas and that's pretty significant amount of nitrogen that we can get and again an advantage and a disadvantage is usually winter kills too sometimes we'd like to see them overwinter and the good thing is if they do overwinter they're easy to go ahead and take care of this up in Marshfield Wisconsin after some plots with Jason calves adeney and we were looking at some different products on different peas out there peas and oats on the left and new straight peas here on the right crimson clover go on record this is national it's my favorite cover crop it's my favorite cover crop because we can produce a whole lot of nitrogen in a short time period it's usually going to win or kill but last year we found up in Green Bay Wisconsin where we were finding crimson clover surviving the winter so will it do that every year no did it last year yes will it hopefully this year yes but we can't guarantee that it will but we can produce up to 140 units of nitrogen within a few months of following wheat so of 90 days after following wheat we've been able to measure up to 140 units of nitrogen earthworms love crimson clover and I don't know why they love it more than they love some of the other clovers and more than they love peas but we find a lot more earthworms there and then again it's easy to kill this is a picture from a friend of mine named Dave chance from he's around Lebanon Indiana which between Lafayette and / and in Indianapolis and this was in his crimson clover field and he just got an absolutely phenomenal stand this that had radishes with it but it really just created a beautiful situation for him field peas now these will be a little less winter hardy than the Austrian winter peas are going to be they won't grow quite as late into the fall as what we would see with the Austrian winter peas normally we'll never overwinter north of Interstate 70 or at least very rarely would they they will produce a little bit less nitrogen just because we don't get quite as much growth and so 60 to 120 units of n can make excellent forage very short a good short-term cover crop as well good for weed control cow pee you know in some parts of the country this is a really awesome cover crop and others it's less so it's more like a summer soybean so if we can get them established we've got good moisture and so forth we can get a real nice stand on these but they need that warmer soil they are a summer legume seed cost is generally an issue seed availability is oftentimes an issue we can't harvest the grain like you would on the soybeans but again we can get 60 to 120 units of n produced more reliable in summer production and what soybeans are going to be medium red clover probably the least cost cover crop if you're from Ontario yes it can work there even though every time I'm in Ontario I hear that they can't grow medium red clover there because their wheats so good but right across the right across the area in Michigan there's beautiful stands of medium red clover in 120-plus bushel an acre wheat so one thing I've seen with medium red clover it's rarely this happens but it might get up to tall and the wheat so affect the harvest so it'd be more like a forage and green harvest at the same time that's never fun but we can produce significant amounts of nitrogen with this good root bill our system good soil builder often our least cost cover crop again is something we frost seed starting here relatively soon well once the 3 foot of snows gone easily killed an excellent for forage and I need to understand there's not three foot of snow out there and it's 60 degrees so after this presentation gotten and Sun yourself ok owl site clover seed cost is generally a little higher than the medium red clover not as good for forage as some of the other clovers good ok for cattle not so good for horses so we got to be careful how we're using our forage again a very good nitrogen producer lower growing than a medium red clover is going to be does very well in the wetter soil so if you've got a situation where you want to frost seed this in - to wheat and you've got some lower areas this may be b1 to be a little more productive in those areas so a medium red I'll psyche mixture might not be a bad mix to use as well-received clover is one that has a pretty short growing season it'll die when it sniffs at a frost and that's something that's a good and bad depending on whether you want to live seed costs is generally pretty expensive if we're going to be using this by itself so it's not one of your lower cost legumes but at the same time it's one that can give us a fairly good amount of nitrogen up to a hundred and 25 units of N in 60 days possibly used between wheat and another fall crop that gives us an option we can also harvest this for forage can make excellent fir for excellent forage so one thing about BER seem that I learned a lot about this last year and prevent plant acres over in in Minnesota up in Minnesota in Wisconsin was the fact that it does not have a real deep root system so it needs a little more moisture than what we would see on some of our other cover crops makes a good cover crop makes an excellent orange but does not have the depth of root on crimson clover we found roots 34 inches deep on clover that's 2 inches tall so I mean it's a real massive root producer you won't find that with pristine clover yellow blossom sweet clover is a very good clover as well excellent soil builder may be one of the best soil builders but there's only one big monster problem with sweet clover it's a host to soybean cyst nematode so if you have soybeans in your rotation choose not to use this if you're going corn after corn for the next 20 years think about it but you know it's not something that we put back in rotations anymore so most most folks have pulled this out of the rotation just because of the soybean cyst nematode problems then we're going to look at hairy vetch hairy vetch job is a tremendous producer of nitrogen very good soil builder most of the nitrogen is going to be found in the top grouse again it's not a super deep rooting prophecies but it also has an issue that although I'm learning there's some may be some less hard seed and some of the differences vetches that are coming out a hairy vetches so but if you're used to using old variety not stated hairy vetch there can be some problems with hard seed make sure and write in your will that you used hairy vetch one year so ok chickling vetch just again real quickly it's a it's one that's a little more costly you'll need to plant this two to three inches deep you want to plant it about fifty pounds per acre and again this would be by itself and again but it can produce a lot of nitrogen up to 200 units of in 50% of the N is reportedly available for the following crop it's one that's really got a lot of promise and benefit if we can get more seed production get the seed cost down I think that can be beneficial to us as well another one has kind of made the press over the last few years or last few months especially Keith sent me this photo but sunhemp can produce up to 120 units of n it's a summer legume plant about nine weeks before a killing Frost some years it's pretty expensive there seems to be a better seed supply over the last couple of years than what there had been so that's one it also has some potential to be used and this one actually I've seen it work better and mixes than by itself in most areas Keith also sent some information on Hmong means and I'm sure that's real popular in all of your areas but it's one that was interesting and I wanted to say Hmong mean during this presentation it is hard to find so it's used for sprouting smaller seed size excellent heat and drought tolerance and that's why I wanted to include it here because just like the cow pee it's gonna have some excellent drought and heat tolerance so that's very good and it's a good nitrogen fixer as well can be hazed hay and grazed and then we need to use a peanut inoculant instead of what we would typically use on a bean or on a pea nitrogen scavengers I scavenge this picture off the internet unfortunately I've never seen him look quite like that but with nitrogen scavengers usually they're not too shy they're more like the guy on the left alright one thing about radishes and peas we find that they're excellent and when we're using those with cover crops and manure radish and peas can work real well you can see in this field the undulation of the different you see the guy that spread to manure wasn't doing a real good job okay so we can see that real easily when we're looking at using scavengers we know that turnips are an excellent scavenger as well and there's not a lot of money spent on advertising turnips so therefore we don't think about turnips a whole lot when we're looking at cover crops but turnips have very similar scavenging abilities is what radish would and if we're using the right turnips we have a lot of soil activity as well so that's something that can be very beneficial this is after hog manure and again you can see the strips where we have our annual rye grass and turnips and you can see exactly where they put down the hog manure on that field what this I hope you can see this alright looks great on my screen but you can see the difference in the radishes where we have nitrogen versus very little if any nitrogen so away from the road they didn't put on the manure but what a difference that we can see when we're scavenging nitrogen I did some work a few years ago over in Ohio Ashland County Ohio at a dairy farm actually I had Eileen helped me on this and also practical Farmers of Iowa helped me I did the collection of the products and we sent the radishes up - up - aims to be able to get tested and what we found was and I did not test the cereal rye and I did not test the oats while they were still living but what I found was just took some of the radishes out of 3 square foot areas and I did that in multiple areas and I then sent those off for testing and what we found was we were collecting about 225 units of in when we were close to the barn and we were scavenging about a hundred and sixty-eight units of n when we were further away so there was a whole lot more nitrogen that was put on closer to the barn and again that was just the radish that did not include what we were scavenging from the cereal rye or from the oats so there was a significant amount of that in it was selected that was kept on my bottom picture there you can see quite a slope and they're putting lots of dairy manure on those slopes and they're believing that they're getting zero runoff and zero loss of their nitrogen when they're using cover crops on that it's pretty amazing that they can put on that much dairy manure on that kind of slope and not get that kind of runoff so we want to make sure when we're putting on any kind of manure that we're using a scavenger another opportunity is is using Sudan grasses or sorghum Sudan grasses or Milo or a variety of different summer annual grasses those can also scavenge up to 200 units of em in this situation the fella got sixty two inches of growth after 31 days after he'd planted it that makes a phenomenal forage he took up four and a half tons I matter off of that excellent quality feed and an excellent soil builder as well so utilizing the sorghum sedans and Sudan's and Milo's and so forth also make for great cover crop and also great forage and I want to show this as well because how much time do I have to ice to have a moment oh good then I'll tell you that I'll spend three and a half on this picture know one thing I want to show about this picture it shows both the production and scavenging in the same picture now again this is not necessarily the radish that you will always get and this was following wheat so we had plenty of time we also had very good moisture so I want to make that clear but I want you to look the the radishes is nice and large which it's a nutrient storage vessel so it's scavenging lots and lots of nitrogen but I want you to see how short my crimson clover is behind that photo my crimson was only about six inches tall and my radish had tremendous amount of growth there one thing we want to realize is even if we have short cover crops especially when we're getting into some of our clovers and so forth that does not necessarily mean we don't have significant amount of nitrogen production this had no manure it had virtually no carryover not a carryover of nitrogen where the where the this had been planted or no carryover after the wheat and it was amazing to me how much nitrogen we can produce in a very short time period with some of these cover crops we when we put radishes in a field or different scavengers in a field we can tell real quickly whether we have enough nitrogen in that field or not just go ahead and plant corn without nitrogen and you can figure out whether you got enough or not we'll see the same thing with our radishes and our turnips and our different grasses and so forth so when we're seeing radishes this size you know you're producing a significant amount of em my guess is from that small crimson clover and looking at that radish we've probably already produced well over a hundred pounds of nitrogen already with that and again we've got two things there that earthworms absolutely love they love the crimson clover they love the radishes and if we had turnips out there we'd find a significant amount of earthworms around them as well so again going further into this we look at annual ryegrass I know we're north of Missouri so it's not a weed and we're not in Indiana either in pockets and not in pockets of Ohio one thing about annual ryegrass is it's a high-risk high-reward kind of cover crop we've heard some things about it too this morning already it may be difficult to kill but there's millions of acres that have been killed fairly effectively over the years so many varieties are will rarely live through the winter so you got to be careful what you're picking but there's a whole lot of long list now of winter-hardy that'll do great probably the deepest and most fibrous root mass of any kind of scavenger that we're going to be able to find we found roots over 70 inches deep on annual ryegrass in the past excellent scavenger event as well winter rye we've talked about that or cereal rye whichever region you're in it can get away from you if you're right looks like that you know one thing about rye it goes from this tall to this tall in about three hours so you've got to be Cain's whichever it is but nevertheless point is it can get away from you very quickly and if you get rye that's that tall that's been rolled that's one option the other option is sell it to a you know get it harvested off so it can work really well with aerial application as well and we've seen some nice yield increase a whole lot of other stuff has found at plant cover crops calm its website have been working on for a number of years and got about seventy thousand people around the world on that so a whole lot of information there and when I get off the speaking route we'll start getting new information on there as well you [Music]

Channel: SARE Outreach

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Keywords: research and education, Soil Quality, SARE Outreach, stewardship, Cover Crop, sustainable, sustainable agriculture, Soil Management, organic, USDA, farming, agriculture, SARE, farm, local food, Crop Diversification, Cover Crops, research, Nutrient Management, on farm research, grants, Soil, Crop, sustainable ag, Soil Conservation, ag, soil health

Id: 0MECOZHEdDg

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 13 2014