Earlier this week I had a chance to catch up with Lisa Kubik. She’s an Iowa grower who grazes cattle and grows corn, soybeans and cover crops, but she also works with growers through Agoro Carbon Alliance. She told me about a cover crop case study and another Iowa farmer she recently worked with who saw great cover crop success by — get this — accidentally planting green. Here’s Lisa with the full story.
“As with a lot of our farms, we have a plan going in and sometimes it doesn’t work out quite like we planned. So, with this specific grower, his original plan was not to plant green, but he ended up planting green and luckily for him, it turned out to be a great experience. There were some places where he had a little bit of effect on germination where he saw a few less plants that germinated just because of the cereal rye that was still there. But in most cases, the crop came up beautifully as long as his row cleaners were working well, which happened on most of the fields. Last spring, which is when he first tried this cover crop, we did have a ton of rain — just heavy rains all at once. And he could see a pretty dramatic difference from where he didn’t have cover crops to where he did. He said, visually, there is a big difference as far as erosion control and where he was able to see that rain actually truly saturating the soil. In this area where we haven’t had a lot of rain in the last couple years, being able to soak in some of those big rains when we don't get the little rains, will make a big difference. So, overall, he did see a benefit in the cover crops, and didn't see any issues as far as compaction. The field that we specifically talked to him about has been chopped for silage the last two years. Typically we see a lot of compaction from that practice. There’s not a lot of residue left and we are running pretty big machinery over that ground. So, he is seeing no compaction which I would attribute a lot of that to that cover corp continuing to grow, as well as our cash crop of course.”
Well a great story there that just goes to show — sometimes the most valuable lessons on the farm are learned by accident. Well that’s all for this week’s Cover Crop Connection.
