Mackane Vogel here with this week’s cover crop connection. No-Till Innovator and Williamsport, Ind., no-tiller Rick Clark knows just how important it is to manage your cover crops as if they were your cash crops. Let’s take a listen to Clark’s advice about the nutrient sequestration powers of cereal rye, and the positive and negative impact it could have on weeds and corn. 

“So now if you want to plant corn into cereal rye, you need to move your nitrogen program further forward to offset what the cereal rye has sequestered nutrient wise. So now the same thing is happening with the weeds. We're buckling the weeds at their knees. The broad leaves are pretty much gone. But now what's happening is now we're to my 70 30 rule. So that cereal rye has suppressed those weeds for 70% of what it needs to be done. If you haven't reached canopy though, now that cereal rye is releasing those nutrients back out, guess what? Just in time for when grass comes on, foxtail is a late emerging weed in the season, we are now dumping all of those nutrients for the foxtail. And here it comes and it comes. If you don't have that good suppression of the biomass from the cover crop and in cash crop canopy, you're going to have foxtail. And we've got foxtail in certain fields, and I can always attribute it back to what I'm just describing.” 

Some wise words as always from No-Till Innovator Rick Clark.