Finding the right fit for cover crops

Farmers with years of experience growing cover crops have made the practice part of their regular cropping operations after finding ways to make it work.

A panel of cover crop growers at the Southwest Ag Conference showed that cover crop practices vary greatly by farm and area.

Ken Schaus, of Schaus Land and Cattle in Bruce County, says his operation started using cover crops in 2008 after the land broken from hay or pasture started to show a lot of erosion.

Since then, Schaus has fine-tuned his crop system on 3,500 acres. Much of it is no-till, and land designated for corn is managed with a Lemken Heliodor.

“I only own one piece of tillage equipment,” he says.

Cover crops are used where it makes sense and when the weather dictates it is possible, he added. Schaus says he started out trying to do too much related to cover crops, but that approach taught him to keep his system simple. Inter-seeding Italian ryegrass into corn worked well and helped the soil, but “it caused too many problems in the spring.”

Schaus says three winter cereals practices work well on his farm:

1. Winter barley gets the full agronomic package with split nitrogen applications, fungicides and a growth regulator. It is combined and followed by a manure application and a cover crop mix that includes barley, peas and oats that is harvested for forage.
2. Winter wheat is followed as quickly as possible by a cover crop. Manure is applied and the cover crop is terminated in the fall and not tilled. Schaus says he hasn’t done fall tillage for 10 years.
3. The third cereal grown is hybrid rye. It’s in the mix to break up the workload. He owns one combine and it makes more sense to harvest barley, then wheat, then hybrid rye. Yields are comparable to wheat. It is followed by a brassica cover crop that is terminated in fall and then the field is planted to soybeans in spring.

Chris Wood, another panelist, farms near Stratford and his program is much different. He focuses on a 12- or 16-species cover crop planted after wheat. It is then strip tilled and planted into corn the following spring.

Wood’s cover crop mix depends on what his seed salesperson has available and is reasonably priced.

“We like to chase the combine so we can get as much growth out of that cover crop as possible,” says Wood. “A key is that we try to manage our cover crop as if it is a cash crop.”

Multiple species in the cover crop reduces his risk.

“I think with the weather, different ones are going to come up on different farms.”

Cover crops get manure and fertilizer. The farm has chickens, but also sources manure from hog and dairy farms. Wood aims for high biomass because “we just like to see a great big cover crop,” he says.

His strip tiller is his cover crop management tool. No-tilling into a cover crop was a challenge.

Wood sprays his cover crops in the fall to control weeds like perennial sow thistle before planting identity-preserved soybean crops.

He has also broadcast rye into standing corn, but hasn’t spent much time managing that cover crop.

Woody Van Arkel farms further southwest in the province, near Dresden, and his cover crop regimen is different from that of the other panelists.

“I’ve gone to the 12 way, I’ve gone to one and all the way back to 12 and down to about four or five,” he says.

He knows which species will “go wild on me” and avoids them. His go-to species now include oats, red clover, flax and occasionally buckwheat and peas. He avoids brassicas because they can contribute to disease in sugar beets and he doesn’t use sunflowers in his cover crop mix because he also grows them as a crop.

The uncontrollable nature of cover crops can be challenging. Van Arkel says a sorghum-Sudan grass cover crop that had a “perfect storm for growing” ended up 12 feet tall, so it was a challenge to pull a strip till machine through it.

He avoids cereal rye on corn land because he’s seen a yield lag from it. He uses clover to inter-seed between corn rows.

Van Arkel says he will use cereal rye as a cover crop seeded after corn is harvested, which is more possible in his area than it is for the other panelists.

Soil health

Soil health is one of the main reasons that farmers use cover crops and not surprisingly, the three panelists in different parts of the province had different results.

Van Arkel says his organic matter hasn’t increased. His goal is to retain any organic matter and he has been successful with that measure.

Wood says he has fields that have increased from 1.9 to 3.9 per cent organic matter, but attributes that to several cropping factors including the cover crops, but also manure, biopellets and minimal tilling.

For Schaus, many fields were in pasture or hay not long ago, so increasing organic matter will be challenging.

– This article was originally published at Farmtario.