Field trials of a new cover crop, CoverCress, are in its third year at the Illinois State University Farm and multiple benefits are being realized as intended.

Cover crops can offer a number of benefits to a cropping system including increased biodiversity, crop/livestock integration, erosion control, or water management. One of the greatest risks to cover cropping is failure to establish, and in North Dakota that often is the result of insufficient moisture. What can be done to reduce the risk of cover cropping?

Forage sorghum, sorghum x sudan, sudangrass, millets, and teffgrass have allowed for risk management in the past but have been especially depended on in recent years for emergency forage. A common rotation that has been adopted is Corn Silage-Winter Cereal-Summer Annual, and summer annuals also being used following spring cereals. Selection of summer annual types and management practices should not be overlooked.

With the cool and wet spring in 2022, there haven’t been many opportunities to seed forages. Looking at the calendar date, is it getting too late to plant forages? The short answer is that there is still some time to seed forages this spring.

Scott Shriver, one of Iowa's leading organic farmers, recently conducted research to determine optimal soybean row-width and seeding dates when roller-crimping cereal rye. The soybeans he planted the day of roller-crimping ultimately yielded higher than those planted 13 and 17 days before.

Pre-emergence herbicides can aid in the control of troublesome weeds such as waterhemp and giant ragweed. They can also result in lower weed densities and a more uniform weed height at the time of postemergence herbicide application, aid in the management of herbicide-resistant weeds, and ultimately help protect crop yield potential and profitability. What if you want to plant a cover crop later in the season? Will a residual herbicide that controls weeds also affect your cover crop?

Establishing sorghum-sudangrass in cool-season western wheatgrass pasture at the Kansas State Agricultural Research Center-Hays improved total forage production over two years, 2020-2021.