Jon Bakehouse didn’t jump right into planting cover crops. Instead, he did a lot of research before finally giving it a try several years ago.

A research team from Ohio State University is inviting farmers in the Maumee River Watershed to participate in a USDA-funded project designed to help better understand the benefits and tradeoffs associated with integrating cover crops into corn-soybean rotations.

Dr. Judith Nyiraneza, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) based in Charlottetown, P.E.I., and Oyster Cove Farms of Hamilton, P.E.I., recently completed a two-year study that tested the performance of cover crops planted following the potato harvest. Read more in this article from Farm Focus.

A trend with beef cattle producers in northwestern Alberta is growing annual cocktail blends for forage production, with those blends including cereals, grasses, legumes and brassicas. ‘There’s a lot of interest in the Peace Country about cocktails, and there are a lot of questions,’ explains Buthaina Al-Maqtari, research technician with Peace Country Beef and Forage Association (PCBFA). Read more in this article from The Stettler Independent (Stettler, Alberta).

This week’s podcast, sponsored by Yetter Equipment, features an interview with Mike Witt, a field agronomist with Iowa State University Extension. Witt discusses several areas of cover crop research, including comparing 30 and 60-inch rows, interseeding cover crops, weed suppression, and grazing cover crops.

Penn State researchers, in a recent study, were surprised to learn that they could take the exact same number of seeds from the same plants, put them in agricultural fields across the Mid-Atlantic region and get profoundly different stands of cover crops a few months later. The study came to be known as “‘farm-tuning’ cover crop mixtures,” noted researcher Jason Kaye, professor of soil biogeochemistry, who added that the findings are significant because they show the need to customize cover crop mixes to achieve desired ecosystem services, depending on soil and climatic conditions.

The Lion King is one of my favorite Disney movies. One of the key principles of the story is the concept of the “circle of life” — how everything in nature is interconnected. Science has shown us that it’s true.