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Cover Crop Research: Update and Planning by Ray Weil, University of Maryland Soil Scientist Editor's note: This article is a second in a series about a research project on multi-benefit cover crops funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture and Research Education program (NE-SARE). The three-year project began in April 2003 and will run through March 2006. In last fall's Future Harvest newsletter we introduced our project to collaborate with farmers in developing cover crop systems using Brassicas - a family of plants in use for some time as cover crops in such places as Brazil, northern Europe, the Pacific Northwest and Australia. As most farmers with a sustainable mind-set already know, cover crops are important soil-improving and pollution-preventing tools. However, there's no denying that using cover crops can complicate farm managment and require significant time and money to implement. If cover crops can provide real short-term economic benefits, in addition to long-term soil improvement, then more farmers are likely to make the investments and adjustments necessary to incorporate cover crops into their farming systems. We are investigating the special properties of Brassica cover crops and their potential for alleviating problems with soil compaction, parasitic nematodes, weed competition, nitrogen leaching or tie-up. If effective, these cover crops should increase crop yields and quality while saving significant dollars that otherwise would be spent on deep tillage, soil fumigation/solarization, nutrient purchases and the like. In experiments at four Maryland locations last fall, we obtained excellent Brassica cover crops by planting in mid-August to mid-September, either by seed drill or culti-packing over broadcast seed. By late October the 'Dichon' forage radish, 'Adagio' oilseed radish and 'Essex' rapeseed had produced about 5,000 pounds of dry matter per acre and had taken about 150 pounds of nitrogen, really cleaning up the soil profile down to at least 6 feet. However, seedings in October produced little biomass before winterkilling, and early March broadcast "frost seedings" failed to establish at two sites. The per-acre seeding rates for successful stands are about 6 pound for mustards, 8 pounds for rapeseed and 13 pounds for the radishes. During the unusually cold periods of the past winter, first the forage radish and then the oilseed radish melted away, leaving in their wake little residue and few early spring weeds. On the other hand, rapeseed survived well, putting on a bit more growth in early spring before bolting and beginning to flower by mid-April. This summer we will grow soybeans in most of the research plots and monitor these plants and the soil. We hope to find out what benefits, if any, the cover crops provided for summer crops. Then we'll start over again, planting the cover crops in mid-August to September - in some cases broadcasting seed as soybean leaves begin to yellow and drop. Now is the time to plan for new cover crops on your farm. If you have specific problems on your farm with soil compaction, nematodes, weeds or nitrogen leaching, perhaps you'd like to work with our UMD team to evaluate the Brassicas (or combinations of other covers with Brassicas). My graduate students and I are interested in collaborating with farmers and we have some grant money to pay for expenses like cover crop seed and extra labor involved in taking on-farm measurements. Please contact me, Ray Weil, at 301/405-1314 or rweil@umd.edu. To view previous articleby Ray Weil,
please click
here.
Research Corner Future Harvest to Facilitate
As part of a USDA-SARE project, Future Harvest - CASA has teamed up with Ray Weil's research group at the University of Maryland and Steve Groff of Cedar Meadow Farm in Pennsylvania to help farmers to conduct their own on-farm research. At the January Farming for Profit and Stewardship conference some 50 farmers got together to discuss how to conduct research and to answer questions about how new practices and products might work on their farms. Learning to carry out simple, but scientifically valid research trials is an invaluable tool for any farmer trying to decide what is really worth spending time and money on, and what isn't. In addition, many find it downright exciting to test their hunches with systematic observations and measurements to see what's really going on in farm fields. Why not take a moment right now think about what researchable questions you may have. Do you know if that organic pesticide you ordered really does make enough of a difference to be worth the cost? Are you wondering if all the effort of growing rapeseed and sorghum before forming beds really paid off with reduced nematode damage on your strawberries? Future Harvest-CASA has set up an
email list serve that will allow you to share questions you have been thinking
about -- and learn what it will take to get real answers. To sign up for
the email list serve, or to possibly collaborate with Ray Weil's group,
contact Bruce Mertz at futureharvestcasa@gmail.com
or phone at 410-604-2681. We are also planning another farmer-researcher
workshop at the annual conference next January in Hagerstown. For more
information on this project watch the "research corner" column in this
newsletter and at www.futureharvestcasa.org.
Future Harvest-CASA |
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Ray Weil