Thursday, July 29, 2010

Cover Crop Conversation Continued

A question was raised concerning the previous blog entry/email.

I have a question on the cocktail mix. It's my understanding that most cover crops are harvest/cut/flailed, etc.
sometime between the start of flowering and halfway into bloom. With a cocktail, how do you determine the optimum time to take the cover crop down? Is it the flowering schedule of the earliest member of the mix?
The average point of all of them?


And the answer:

Most of our farmers terminate the cover crop with winter kill, meaning it is allowed to fully develop. Before moving into soil health we terminated all sunlight harvest after grain harvest. Now we use the cover crops to harvest the sunlight from grain harvest to winter. This sunlight ultimately becomes additional carbon in the soil. Making increases in soil organic matter more achievable. We have built soil health based no-till systems on the cropland and grazing systems on the rangeland, then the cover crops are used as a bridge to connect the cropland and rangeland. We try for a continual live root, just like native rangeland has. The livestock are a tool to harvest 40-50% of the cover crop biomass, leaving the remainder as soil armor. The livestock can also be used to terminate cover crops by mob grazing. I have attached pictures showing what the soil cover looks like before





and after




having 750,000 lbs of beef per acre graze a cool season cover crop cocktail. Our local Soil Conservation District also has a crop roller which is used to terminate rye or field pea.


We rolled the pea during bloom and the rye during 50%+ anthesis, both were seeded as monocultures. Occasionally we have farmers who terminate a cover crop mixture with herbicide, but only rarely with tillage.

1 comment:

walter said...

This question was emailed to me by a friend too shy to post here. So I offer it up. Any answers? "...but it is my understanding that if you are using a cover crop on your garden area and do not have livestock grazing, you would need to cut before the crop goes to seed. letting the crop go to seed (which is possible as i understand for some winter covers) would obviously create problems in your normal planting season.

as you know, i have no personal experience with this but have been researching the possibility myself and have read this from several different sources. i was going to try it this year but do not know how to mix the crop types to balance the soil needs....would love to have your help on this.

thanks for the topic on the blog...interesting."