Tillage Radish Cover Crop

for Kevin ell me a friendly acres seed farm near Salt cult Saskatchewan it's important to stay on top of cropping trends this is a 180 acre field of tillage radish mixed with crown millet which is the result of the growing interest in cover crops when a customer asked him about cover crop options several years ago he brought in the only radish he had access to at the time I had turned out to be an oilseed radish and the oilseed radish went to seed too quickly it produced too big of a stalk and it was just ugly to deal with the next year so I started doing some research in the United States where they were doing a lot more of the cover cropping and asked them what radish do they use because I like the idea of this big group going into the ground and breaking up the soil and everybody came back to me saying it's tillage radish is what you're after here we see a pit dug by L me to show the tillage radish root and how it provides farmers with a natural method for overcoming soil compaction problems he says the root is always looking for the easiest way down so once it gets a path a root path through what it'll do is in the tuber it stores energy and nutrients so when it's storing these nutrients it starts expanding so what happens is if it hits a spot like down and through here where there's a bit of a hard soil it finds its way through and then it starts expanding and when it expands it's almost like a rock hitting the windshield where you get this shattering of the soil effect so when people talk about vertical tillage this is I guess a more natural way of creating cracks in the soil to allow the nutrients in air and and improper root development to go through in this way the tillage radish naturally aerates the soil it also finds soil nutrients that were previously unavailable and makes them available to upcoming crops so the more roots he have the more feeding spots with the radish what'll do is it feeds basically from from the the tip the the main drinks them down the bottom here and it'll do some secondary feeding usually past where the the the the secondary roots of your cereal are so it's something where it'll go down it'll grab those nutrients that the these these plants aren't going to be able to get and bring up storm in its root the following year the tillage radish will start rotting which we can see in these pictures at that point those nutrients can be taken up by the next crop and instead of being unavailable deep in the soil I see it something we're in in the next few years potentially 15 to 20 percent of our acres are gonna be cover crops which then we'll be switching into they're growing winter triticale into or soybeans or corn or we'll have will have the playbook open so we can we can then better manage the soil utilize the soil what and what's in it the tillage radish plant is part of the Brassica family the same family where you also find canola and mustard probably closer related to mustard than knopf because the glucosinolates and the leaves are really now they're quite a bit higher much like mustard and you can really taste them when you when you eat the Leafs it has a little bit of a bite these are inedible root also but basically with the the foliage looks much like a mustard plant maybe a little bit of a canola plant but when you start looking at the the protein like because it's a forage variety it produces lots of leaf good feed values on it this field was seeded about six weeks ago with a mix of one pound per acre of tillage radishes and ten pounds per acre of crown millet helmi prefers this for grazing over a pasture of pure Tilly's radishes I don't recommend grazing pure radishes because the protein is too high and they're all to feed bellies too high to do a blend kind of like this where you have some of the tillage radish say some crown millet some oats but he can get a leg Ewing in there or not some some hybrid Brassica do a cocktail grazing blend that really works really quite well with for the animals the tillage radish seed is a bit bigger than canola Almy says it's important to know what the crop will be used for before it goes into the ground because that will likely determine your target date for seeding basically what you're looking at is seeding the tillage radish anytime after July first if you're if you're just gonna look for doing the the soil improvements recovering nutrients and then doing breaking up hard pan if you're gonna be grazing you can graze see them earlier but you'll want to make sure it doesn't go to flower so you're gonna want to graze it through green feed it off and and keep it in the vegetative state like canola tillage radish is susceptible to frost damage as a seedling but once it has a good root development it can withstand a substantial frost ellemeet oldest independent research has shown that tillage radish has good Club root resistance even on previously infested soil we're relieved to find out that it has very low infestation rates like the canola was probably 10 times higher than what the the the tillage radish Sept ability is so we're looking at one two three maybe four percents infestation on the on the tillage radish where that canola was 20-30 percent so it looks looks promising especially when we start doing these cocktail blends I don't anticipate any any concerns or problems with it here they are combining winter triticale one of the several crops Elmi expects to benefit from following the tillage radish in the rotation at the same time this cover crop should reduce the cost per acre for just about all of the crops they grow you

Channel: Prairie Farm Report

Views: 79,293

Keywords: PFR, Prairie Farm Report, rural, farm business, entrepeneur, rural enterprise, farm, farmer, canada, farming, agriculture, small acre farming, 4K, UHD, Ultra HD, radish, tillage radish, saskatchewan, cover crop, crop farming, crop profiles, tillage radish cover crop

Id: ZiqiNjD4sQ4

Length: 6min 11sec (371 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2017