Cover cropping is no different. Adding diversity to a rotation can be intimidating and confusing. There are a lot of variable to consider. Most of them will be determined by climate, finances, goals and seed availability to name a few. So, what are the common reasons for cover crop failures?

1. Lack of goals
If you’re going on a road trip, you need to know where you’re going. Same thing for cover crops. Setting goals will help you determine what species to use. Using the wrong species will give results that do not match your goals. Hard pan remediation, grazing, hay, nitrogen fixation, increasing diversity, weed smothering, fall growth and reducing erosion are some examples of goals that can be met with cover crops.

2. Wrong timing
Species grow better when seeded at the time best for them. Seeding berseem clover or radish early into a cash crop will create harvest issues, as the berseem clover or radish will grow up into the cash crop. If you’re looking for nitrogen fixation, seeding legumes after July 15 will produce very little nitrogen. On the flip side, radish should be seeded later than August 1 for lowest level of management.

3. Wrong weather events
Farming success is dictated by the weather. In 2018, we broadcasted subterranean clover into our spring triticale. Then it did not rain until September. The clover germinated in June then died. When we seeded radish using a plane in 2015, we got a rain after and got a wonderful catch. Rains at the right time, if fall seeding — getting proper hardening off, and missing drought makes you look like a genius.

4. Wrong species selection
This is where many failures occur. Using the correct species makes many other mistakes disappear. If relay cropping, having a species that will either tolerate the cash crop competition, or is able to go dormant and come alive after the cash crop is removed is important. Grazing is another example. For grazing, species that will regrow and tolerate hoof traffic are important.

5. Identifying wrong causes
Like other troubleshooting issues, knowing the difference between the symptom versus the cause of the problem can create a different type of prescription. Is the low yield due to low organic matter, poor structure, salinity or hard pan? The causes can be related — salinity causes low infiltration, poor structure, hard pan and low organic matter.

6. Not enough patience
Sometimes the damage is so great it can’t be reversed by one treatment. Hard pan was created over years of abuse. Getting deep roots to penetrate the layer may take a couple of years. The same goes for salinity. Using different levels of salinity tolerance will act an indicator. As the soil is remediated, the less saline tolerant species start to show up.

7. Wrong seeding method
Matching seeding methods with seed is important. Broadcasting fababean and corn is going to give a low success rate. Seeding chicory the same depth as fababean is going to make the chicory fail. Chicory is a very small seed, so seeding deep is going to cause a high mortality in the seedlings.

8. A pest bridge
A pest bridge occurs when two crops are grown either together or in close succession. This increases hosts for shared insects, diseases and other ailments. An example is growing radish before canola. Not a good idea. These two crops share diseases, flea beetles eat both, and if all the radish do not germinate the year before canola, they can end up producing seed and being harvested with the canola. Fall rye before wheat is another example of a pest bridge.

9. Too much competition
When intercropping and cover cropping, space needs to be made for the extra plants. A quick rule of thumb is to aim for 120 per cent of the plants in total as compared to a monoculture. When the cash crop is decreased, more light gets through allowing the understory crops to establish.

These are a few common issues that can cause a wreck. Even experienced producers of cover crops and intercrops will have occasional hiccups. Having your homework done, knowing what you are trying to manage, what species, when to seed them, how to manage them, and watching weather patterns will allow execution of your plan.

Getting started

If setting goals is an issue and soil health is an overlying goal, start with the five key points of soil health: reduce tillage, reduce synthetic inputs, keep living roots in the soil, keep the soil covered, and include livestock on the land. Producers from Mississippi to LaCrete, Alta., have told me they cannot use cover crops for numerous reasons. But there are a significant number of growers around LaCrete growing cover crops successfully.

Every farm will be different due to different goals. Once cover crops are started on an operation more opportunities for cover crops will appear in different parts of the rotation, different soil types, different production risks and different climatic trends. And remember, diversity trumps density. Cover crops do not need to be as thick as the main cash crop. One to three plants per square foot may be adequate.

Cover cropping and intercropping are just more tools in the tool box. Using a welder and cutting torch as the main source of fixing is quick and efficient at the time, but the resale value of the equipment will deteriorate quickly. Using the right tool at the right time will improve the equipment, ensuring it runs as it should. Same for the soil. We need to start fixing our soils. Jay Fuhrer from the United States Department of Agriculture said if we take more carbon out of the soils than we put in, our children will not farm. If we put more carbon in than we take out, our children will be able to farm that land.

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In a conference this winter, Jay Fuhrer, a conservationist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Bismarck, North Dakota, said he hears producers say, “My grandfather was a good farmer. He could grow anything. My father was good, but not as good as his dad. I’m struggling to make a living.” The reason? The grandfather was farming high-carbon soil, the father was farming medium-carbon soil and the son is farming low-carbon soils. Carbon is the energy source, stored as organic matter.

Practices like minimum till and zero till, continuous cropping, and growing winter cereals have helped to reduce soil carbon losses, but some of our crop choices, nutrient application, loss of fences, and nutrient export have eroded carbon out of our soil. This may make some people’s blood pressure rise, but our modern practices are reducing our stable organic matter and driving many of our soils to be bacterially dominated.

Bacterial-based soils are addicted to inputs. They require nutrients, fungicides and insecticides. Bacteria-based soils can also be characterized by having high nitrates, which allow weeds to grow. This is not necessarily a “conventional” or an “organic” problem, as both systems can create a bacterial-based soil. Tillage, synthetic inputs and crop rotation influence the bacterial fungal ratio.

Adding carbon

There is a difference in the quality of carbon we can put into the soil, according to Jill Clapperton, principal scientist, founder and owner at Rhizoterra. Not only do we need to add carbon, we need quality carbon. “Low” quality carbon is not stable in the soil and will be released back to the atmosphere. Higher quality carbon will be stable and allow carbon growth in the soil. Some of the most stable carbon sources are carbohydrate, sugars and proteins. The deeper in the soil it is found, the more stable it is.

One strategy to add quality carbon is to keep plants growing throughout the season, particularly deep-rooted species. Root exudates, chemicals released by plants into the soil, help build microbial populations. As microbe populations build, especially fungi, earthworm populations start to build. This has to be incorporated with the reduction of tillage, use of synthetic inputs and a more diverse crop rotation. Once there is a better balance between bacteria and fungi, many problems start to disappear.

The other issue that keeps bacterial soil bacterial is the use of tight Brassica rotations, including canola. When producers have canola in a tight rotation, soils will be dominated by bacteria, and need high levels of inputs, especially nitrogen. When high levels of nitrogen are added to the soil, bacteria require carbon to utilize it, thus decreasing the soil carbon levels. Canola is a low carbon returner to the soil, putting more strain on the soil carbon cycle. That is why producers see yield increases by adding more inputs.

As soil carbon levels drop, water infiltration is reduced, compaction issues arise, erosion increases, nutrient use efficiency drops, root zones become reduced, root diseases become more prevalent, and so on. To change one management practice on the farm helps, but does not necessarily solve the issue. Microbiologist and founder of Soil Foodweb Inc., Elaine Ingham, said “it took a million years to build our soils, we are destroying it in 100.”

The United States Department of Agriculture has five key points to help build soils: reduce tillage, increase plant diversity, keep the soil covered, keep a living root in the soil and livestock inclusion. As the soil carbon increases, the balance of bacteria to fungi improves, and a lot of agricultural production problems start to disappear, along with the costs incurred to solve these problems. We have an agricultural sales industry that relies on our soils to be bacterial. With more balanced microbes, farming can become fun and profitable.

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Looks like the excess water issue that we had for eight years solved itself. Two years of below-normal moisture has dried up water holes and sloughs. May looked alright, seeding started relatively early and we got to seed many of the acres that in the past few years we haven’t been able to get to. After some late May and early June rains, conditions looked really good. Then the tap turned off again.

We seeded pedigree Mahony R2 and Barron R2X soybeans, pedigree AAC Delight spring triticale, grazing corn, cover crops and pedigree perennial ryegrass. We have two fields of alfalfa for hay, and sainfoin for seed production in. Our goal with the hay is to have a short forage stand, leaving it in for three to four years, taking a cut early and leaving the regrowth.

For product trials on the farm, we used EcoTea seed dressing, Magnetar, Wapaw Bay Humates and a few new cover crop species in our demonstration cover crop plots.

Mid-June, the rains stopped and temperatures rose. I had broadcast some subterranean clover into the triticale after herbicide application. It germinated and died. That is the risk of broadcasting cover crop seed. There were a few areas where salinity was starting to show up in the spring triticale, so I seeded a mix of radish, turnip/rape hybrid, safflower, sunflower, and sugar beet into it. In short order, the soil was covered by green plants. As Jay Fuhrer, a soil health specialist with the USDA in North Dakota, says, “We need to learn how to transpire water from the plant instead of evaporating it from the soil.”

Our crop walk was on the last Sunday of July. One of the demonstrations was a drone that flew and took NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetative Index) photographs of three of our quarters. NDVI records near-infrared light that is reflected by plants and red light that the vegetation absorbs. This shows actively growing plants. The interesting thing we saw was that the spring triticale field was red, showing low plant activity, while the alfalfa, soybeans and grass sloughs were green. This stresses how important the use of cover crops, intercrops and relay crops are for soil health. In the triticale field, because the plants slowed down photosynthesis, we started starving our soils starting in the middle of July. If we’d had a relay cover crop underneath, it would have remained green, feeding our soil microbes. We would have gained an extra 90 days of sugars being pushed into our soils, allowing the microbes to build aggregation and fix more carbon.

I found a site that archived NDVI maps from the growing season, and could find where I did the high biology seed dressings, EcoTea, Magnetar, and humates, with positive results. With the dry season, the biology was less of a limiting factor than the rainfall we received. In 2018, I spent more money on biologicals than I did on synthetic fertilizer. My average fertilizer cost per acre was $4.25.

The harvest

Once harvest started, our AAC Delight averaged just under 70 bushels per acre, using a 5-27-27 blend. The Mahony R2 yielded just under 30 bushels per acre. The Barron R2X were hit hard with Iron Deficiency Chlorosis (IDC) and yielded around 10 bushels per acre. The Barron were seeded on cover crop ground that frost-terminated in the fall. With the trash cover, they were slower to establish. By that time, the residue started to rot, releasing nitrogen to the soil. High-nitrogen soil will induce an IDC response, and the plants were not able to recover. I should have had a spring cereal seeded with the soybeans to absorb the free nitrogen. We would terminate the cereal crop with herbicide, or have it intercropped and harvest both in the fall. Another year, another trial. Density of the cereal would be low, 20 to 30 per cent of a normal seeding rate.

The mid-harvest snow was not what we needed or wanted, but we did have half of our spring triticale off before it came. Our soybeans did not lodge through the snowy weather, nor did any pods pop open. The triticale we had out was swathed, and we eventually harvested it a bit tough, aerated it down to dry.

Changes ahead

For 2019 there will be some significant changes at Friendly Acres. My father is retiring, so is selling four of our nine quarters of land. Our equipment rentals will come to an end as I will not have any extra time to maintain and track our corn planters and Valmar.

Three quarters of our five quarters will get seeded down to pasture, and we intend to work with a local bison producer who will come in to harvest the forage. We’ll look at soil health using livestock on these quarters. Our home half will still have some grain production, but it will be a seven-year rotation, without any canola: soybean/full-season legume cover crop underseeded to perennial ryegrass intended for seed production/perennial ryegrass/alfalfa/alfalfa cover crop/spring triticale. From what we have seen, all the acres will receive EcoTea, Magnetar and humates. I will be dropping all synthetic fertilizer from my budget unless the results from the biology test I’ve sent to the Chinook Applied Research Soil Health Lab tells me different.

Change can either be feared or embraced. The most dangerous phrase is “we do it this way because that is the way it has always been done.” It is encouraging to see more soil health topics showing up in the media and at meetings. It looks like more people are looking at changing how they are looking at the agricultural system they are working with.

The post Friendly Acres 2018 year in review appeared first on Grainews.

The first thing we need to find out is where are we?

Nicole Masers is an agro-ecologist with Integrity Soils. For her three-day course in regenerative soil systems, part of my pre-course assignment was to send a soil test away to Earthfort Lab for a biology test. In order to get a baseline, we sent three samples of our soil away, along with a neighbour’s soil sample.

When the testing was done, we had an email asking if we were interested in a one-on-one with Matt Slaughter, the Earthfort Lab owner and manager. After a long phone call, we developed new management targets and strategies for our operation to further improve our microbial counts. It was very interesting to see the difference between our soil and our neighbour’s soil.

Mother Nature tries to keep the fungi:bacteria ratios in check. She tries to make bacterial-based soils, which is what most of are soils are in “traditional” agricultural, more fungal. Mother Nature does this by getting weeds to grow, and signaling that we need to change our environment and management by having insect and disease issues.

On the other extreme, fungal-dominated soil are found in forests. These are slow-growing, stable ecosystems.

In either case, when the soil microbe balance becomes “extreme,” Mother Nature creates disturbance to try to create more balanced microbial populations. Bacterial soils will cycle nutrients quicker, but are prone to nutrient losses. Fungal soils cycle nutrients slowly, but create a more sustainable growth.

Have you ever broken up hay or pasture? Did you notice that for the first few years, there are usually no wild oats or cleavers, but after a few years they started coming back? Wild oats and cleavers grow in soils that are predominately bacterial. Hay or pasture tends to be close to balanced or slightly fungal in nature. As the field is cultivated, sprayed and fertilized, the soil drifts toward a more bacterial ratio. Weeds will show you what is wrong biologically with your soil.

In the soil, there is more organism diversity than we may ever know. With change (climate, plants growing, human- or naturally-created disturbance or changing season), a different part of the microbe diversity awakens.

As agriculture management continues with monocultures and cropping systems with low diversity, we will continue to see low diversity in the microbial populations that are active in our soil. With low diversity, we see issues with plant health, nutrient cycling, water cycling, and the reliance on synthetic inputs.

We still use conventional management on our farm — we purchase some herbicides and fertilizer. The key is that the amount we require today is much lower than in the past. As we build soil health, balancing the bacteria and fungi in the soil, the amount of chemical inputs we purchase will continue to decline.

Bacterial and fungal soils

Bacterial soils are quite easy to identify by looking at or seeing how the soil responds to inputs. Bacterial soils tend to have low soil aggregation, respond to inputs, have slow water infiltration, will have weeds that are easy to pull out of the soil, like cleavers and wild oats, and may have erosion issues.

Soils are driven to a bacterial-dominated state though high disturbance deep in the soil profile, season-long fallow, high rates of synthetic fertilizer, use of fungicides and seed treatments, monoculture and simple cropping systems.

The issues with drainage in Western Canada were driven by years of above normal rainfall. But, as unpopular as this may be, the reason drainage became such as issue that the water infiltration into the soils has decreased at an alarming rate. Our soils are now hydrophobic — repelling water instead of storing it. Yes, there are areas where the soil is saturated and abnormal amounts of rain have fallen, but there are too many acres where water ponds on the soil. By increasing soil aggregation, organic matter, and fungal populations and improving soil health, we can make many of these issues disappear.

On the other extreme is a pasture or hay field that becomes non-productive and too fungal. These forage stands will have encroachment of woody shrubs, an indication that the soil has become too fungal. Before roads were made across the prairies, Mother Nature kept the soil from becoming too fungal through grass fires that decreased the fungal population and increased the bacteria. That would not create anything positive today. But adding nutrition, doing some soil aeration and increasing plant diversity we can stimulate bacteria, allowing quicker nutrient cycling (assuming there is a food source for the microbes to eat).

Managing organic matter

Carbon is the key to energy in ecosystems. Plants capture carbon from the atmosphere and converte it to sugars. A large percentage of that sugar gets leaked into the soil to feed microbes, which convert soil nutrients into plant-available sources. In most agricultural soils, the organic matter is decreasing. The decrease of organic matter is a loss of carbon from the soil.

The loss of carbon and organic matter coupled with monoculture farming practices is reducing microbial diversity in the soil. This is creating a bacterial soil that relies on our “help” with fertilizer, pest suppressants and tillage.

I am not advocating using no synthetic inputs, but we as an industry need to look at how to manage with less. Fewer inputs with healthy soils will increase our productivity and profitability.

We need to look at how to properly feed the soil ecosphere to keep it healthy and productive. Every time we do something to the soil or add something, we are adjusting the microbial profile. As Nicole Master said, every time we do something negative to the soil, we should aim at doing two positive things. Its time to start building the resource we call dirt.

The post Balancing the soil biology appeared first on Grainews.

May did look fairly promising. The soil was moist, dry enough to get out on the land early May. This year we seeded AAC Delight spring triticale, Barron R2X and Mahony R2 soybeans, an alfalfa trial, a grazing corn trial, sweet corn, a new non-GMO canola, and an array of cover crops.

Seeding

Seeding went relatively smoothly, we only had to use the tow strap a couple of times, which was a nice change over the last few years. The first part of June was cool so we decided to delay weed control in the corn and soybeans. Some of the volunteer canola ended up getting a little too big for consistent control, especially in the low land, so we had a few escapes.

In mid-June we seeded cover crops, including our strip trials. The field-scale blends we used incorporated Japanese millet, Pearl millet, proso millet, non-GMO corn, sugar beet, safflower, Phacelia, berseem clover, crimson clover, Bullseye radish and collards. The intent was to sell an early cut of silage and then provide food for the soil microbes and earthworms.

Because the early June rains were the last of the growing season, growth of the cover crop was sporadic. We decided to run over the acres with the hay bine to clip the growth, returning it all back to the soil without creating a seeding issue next spring. By returning all the production back to the soil, we will increase our soil microbe population, and our nutrient levels will be elevated, along with increasing organic matter and more soil armour. As the plant material was still green, the lignin content will be relatively low, and sugar content will be high, so it will rot down quickly in the spring. Our cash income is reduced, but the future cash expense is also reduced.

The cover crop was direct seeded into winter triticale that had volunteered from two years ago. Because the field was intended to be silaged, the volunteer triticale was left to add more biomass. The plan was to allow the triticale to head out, get to flowering, and then roll it. Rolling would pinch the stem and cause the plant to die. Due to there being some foxtail barley in it, we sprayed the fields with glyphosate. Once the winter triticale died, due to it being into the reproductive stage and lignin started to fully develop, it added to the soil armour. This armour protected the seedlings from the hot dry summer. Did it use too much moisture on some of the land? Maybe. It did reduce the evaporation by covering the soil. This will also help manage salinity by limiting evaporation.

The crops

The soybeans did respectively well considering the year. Our average was 24 bushels per acre across all seeded acres. Around Yorkton where they received some July and August rains, yields were around 30 bushels per acre, then south of Canora, yields were reported just over 40 bushels per acre. This is our first experience with XtendiMax (glyphosate and dicamba) on a large scale. Where the canola was sprayed at the right stage, control was quite good. Where the canola got too large, we had escapes. With the media reports of drift and tank-cleaning issues, we had some reservations about the product. Following application recommendations, we had very little non-target crop damage. There was evidence of some damage on some sainfoin.

Key points to application of dicamba: use coarse or ultra-coarse droplet size, spray when weeds are small, keep ground speed under 15 m.p.h., keep water volumes over 10 gallons per acre, and do not spray when temperatures get over 24 C.

The grazing corn took a production hit this year. With no rain during silking, seed set was reduced. Corn is drought tolerant to a point, but no rain is no rain. Cows are grazing the field currently so there is no estimate of the tonnage. Other silage corn in the area this year was running around 12 tonnes per acre, or about three dry tonnes per acre, which should average out to around 200 grazing days per acre. Dow Seeds is launching its Enlist program this year so it will be interesting to see how that system works in the field. We had a conventional corn trial in this year. There are no legitimate conclusions to make considering the growing season.

Next year’s plan

In 2018, the plan is to grow more spring triticale, trial more conventional corn varieties, have similar acres of cover crops, try growing some perennial ryegrass for seed production, and continue with Mahony R2 and Barron R2X soybeans, sainfoin and alfalfa in rotation. One field of cover crop will be an experiment where we seed once and get two years out of it by including festulolium, chicory and serradella.

The other research projects will include the use of humates, calcium, and potentially some hydrolyzed fish. I attended Nicole Master’s course in Saskatoon this winter. One of the homework assignments was to send a soil sample away to Earthfort for biology tests. To boost better balance of the microbes it was suggested to look at including those three products in my management. You only learn by doing, so away we go!

Hydrolyzed fish?

Kevin Elmy’s mention of adding hydrolyzed fish to his soil left me stumped. So I phoned him to ask.

“It’s fish oil,” he said. “An organic soil amendment.”

Remember when you learned that Native Americans had planted fish along with the corn and beans, to grow a better crop? This is just like that, Kevin told me. “The oil stimulates biology in the soil.”

Kevin says there are quite a few companies processing and selling hydrolyzed fish. He prefers to buy oil from deep sea fish, rather than shallow fish. “Fewer pollutants.”

Kevin hasn’t applied hydrolyzed fish yet, but he is planning to spray it on in liquid form in 2018, along with some other products. Hopefully, he’ll let us know how it works out.

“How does it smell?” I asked. “It’s a little fishy.”

The post My 2017 crop year in review appeared first on Grainews.

In any business, net profit is the difference between costs and revenue. The two ways to increase profit are to increase revenue or decrease costs. If the two can be done at the same time, more profit is made. Simple, right?

In a livestock situation, revenue can be generated by grazing or haying the cover crop. Haying may seem like a withdrawal from the nutrient cycle, but it may fit the set goals. Days of grazing or tonnes per acre are easy to measure and value, so it’s easy to calculate the revenue generated. Costs are in place. Profit can be determined.

• Read more: Good reasons to plant cover crops

The revenues that are harder to measure are the soil health and the nutrient cycling aspect of cover crops. That is where producers without livestock have trouble putting an economic value on including cover crops in rotations. What is the value of reducing hard pan soils? How much profit can be generated by reclaiming sour or saline patches? What’s the return on investment from having plants growing in the soil throughout the growing season, feeding the soil biology? It’s difficult to come up with quick answers.

It’s easier to put a value on a legume cover crop with the goal of fixing nitrogen. By using a feed test to estimate the nitrogen contained in the cover crop, it’s possible to estimate nitrogen available for the next crop. There are some variables like how well was the legume nodulated, how lignified was it, is it being incorporated, soil moisture condition, and how is the soil microbiology working. The amount of nitrogen available for the next crop can be multiplied by the value of nitrogen per pound to calculate the value of the legume crop.

But how does one value a cover crop like diakon radish, used to break up hard soils? Crops grown afterwards may respond to the soil’s improved rooting characteristics. Radish will scavenge nutrients deeper in the soil profile and redistribute them in the top part of the soil. Radish roots rotting in the spring will help warm the soil, and if minimum-tilled into the residue, radish will result in extended weed-free conditions for the seedling crop.

Another property that’s hard to value is increasing organic matter. Once a cash crop is harvested, there are usually no living plants on a field in the fall. Adding a post-harvest cover crop means plants are photosynthesizing, pumping sugars into the soil in the fall. The plants continue to sequester carbon, building organic matter.

Higher organic matter will allow quicker absorption of water, allow the soil to retain more water and improve nutrient cycling, root structure and nutrient efficiency. It will also protect the soil from erosion and sustain more soil microbes.

Sharpen those pencils

The first cost to consider is the cost of the cover crop seed. Costs can range from $2 to over $80 per acre. Species used, seeding rate, on-farm seed supply, and seeding methods all contribute to the costs.

When a small-seeded cover crop is mixed in with a cash crop and seeded at the same time, costs are low. Seeding a large-seeded species on its own costs more. On our farm, using a full-season cover crop blend that we green feed, we include millets, Phacelia, tuber plants, and annual legumes, which normally costs around $28 per acre. Seeding bullseye radish at six pounds per acre would cost just under $20 per acre. Adding one pound per acre of Persian clover to a spring-seeded crop costs around $4 per acre. These costs don’t include seeding.

There may be other management costs. For example, if daikon radishes are seeded too early, they will bolt. A bolted radish field will be difficult to deal with the next year unless a disc opener seeder is used. The field may have to be clipped or mowed. It’s important to know each species’ growth characteristics.

Until a production cycle is completed, the direct economics of cover cropping can be described as fuzzy. Improving soil health, increasing organic matter and improving soil microbe diversity all have long-term implications but no direct revenues. The value of nutrient cycling and breaking up of hard pan can be seen quickly. Nitrogen fixation is the easiest to measure and link to an actual cash value. After the production cycle is completed, and microbes can do what they do, results become more evident.

We’ve noticed our crops are healthier and require fewer inputs. Cover crops have improved our net income.

The post The economic value of growing cover crops appeared first on Grainews.

About 20 per cent of our acres were seeded in the fall of 2015 to Luoma winter triticale, which helped reduce the spring stress level. Fifteen per cent of our land is seeded to alfalfa that we cut for hay, and we have a small field of sainfoin that we are learning how to grow for seed production.

We started seeding on May 18, which is fairly normal for us. The first plot we seeded was sweet corn.

In 2015, we started up a new brand, Cover Crops Canada. This umbrella group has retailers from LaCrete, Alta., to Winkler, Man. Becoming an authorized importer seemed the logical way to speed up seed imports.

We seeded two SeCan soybean varieties this year: Mahony R2 and Barron R2X. Mahony R2 is a medium maturing (003 Relative Maturity) and the Barron R2X is a new Xtend soybean with a rating of 0008 Relative Maturity. A flat tire on our tractor on Saturday night, rain Monday, delayed seeding, but we got the rest of the soybeans in by June 1.

Next on the list was to seed our corn plot. On June 10, we got the grazing corn field seeded, along with our corn grazing variety trial. Then the monsoon season started.

Cover crop seeding

Cover crop seeding was next on the list. The biggest weed issue on our farm is RoundUp Ready canola. We found light tillage works well to control it. But between rains, the canola just kept germinating, causing us to delay seeding. We finally got seeding on June 28. The first field seeded was a demonstration plot of cover crop species.

Then the field scale seeding began. My main blend was red proso millet, Japanese millet, pearl millet, sorghum Sudan, sugar beet, forage collards, crimson clover, safflower, and phacelia that we were planning on using as a greenfeed crop.

More showers delayed seeding, until we finally wrapped up on July 9, with 350 acres seeded in 12 days.

Winter triticale was ready to harvest first. I’ve learned that chicory will overwinter, the triticale crop needs to be swathed instead of straight cut. Swathing, for the last few years, creates rain.

Once started, harvest went relatively smoothly. Test results showed 28 per cent fusarium infection and eight ppm vomitoxin. There goes seed potential. We’ve decided to take the year off of winter cereals and will wait for the environment to dry out before getting back into any cereal grain production.

Soybeans

Soybeans looked good all summer everywhere I went. There were few issues, minus flooding and hail. From our past experience, spraying fungicide has not been cost effective.

Our soybean harvest started at the normal time. Both varieties matured within a couple of days of each other, so I have rated the Barron R2X to be more like a 002 relative maturity instead of 0008. We have been growing 003 maturity soybeans from Day 1, and have had no issues on maturity. But we have been screening for varieties that are more determinant versus heat-requiring varieties. On cool years, the heat loving varieties require the heat units that they are rated for, where the more determinant types will mature when night temperatures start to drop, or daylight hours decrease. Overall, soybeans averaged 32 bushels per acre, based on seeded acreage. We did lose some acres to flooding, again.

It’s been seven years since we have purchased nitrogen for our farm. On 1,500 acres, we normally buy $5,000 to $7,000 worth of a phosphate potassium blend, which I can see dropping in the near future. Between cover crops and soybeans, our fertilizer requirement is dropping, and our soil tests are maintaining or building.

Next year, we will continue growing soybeans, continue with corn grazing and short term alfalfa in our rotation, and continue screening species for cover crop use.

Here’s to a “normal” 2017.

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Crop diversity, rotational diversity and, if possible, getting animals on the land, are the ways to start building soil health. Old time agronomy! It makes sense when some are talking about maintaining our soils, but why maintain a degraded resource? Our goal should be to improve our soil. When we build quality organic matter in the soil, microbes and earthworms will return to the soil. With the return of soil microbiology, natural soil fertility returns.

Soil fertility

Most of the natural fertility from the soil can be traced back to mycorrhizae, a naturally occurring fungus in the soil that works with grasses, legumes, forbs and some broadleaf plants. The mycorrhizae work with the plants. In exchange for carbohydrates, the mycorrhizae provide the plant with water and nutrients the plant normally has lower access to. To survive, the mycorrhizae require a food source, high quality organic matter, living plants and a place to live. High disturbance “recreational” tillage breaks down the organic matter and kills plants.

Another source of nutrient cyclers are the earthworms. At the Edmonton conference, I had an enlightening discussion with Dr. Jill Clapperton, scientist and co-founder of Rhizoterra, a U.S.-based company that helps farmers create healthy soils. She educated me on earthworms.

Earthworms burrow in the soil, creating tunnels that they travel in. They eat organic matter, bacteria, protozoa and fungi. They then defecate in their tunnels. Microbes grow in their feces; earthworms return and eat their own feces.

Fungi in the soil are the preferred food source for most of the soil life. Fungi contain a more balanced nutrient concentration in their cells, creating a better food source. Earthworms are an indicator of soil health.

Fungi just do not digest organic matter, fungi are attracted to high quality organic matter. This is one of the areas where cover cropping gives producers the ability to ensure that our “soil livestock” have the correct nutrition. Producing high-quality organic matter to return to the soil to feed our microbes. Building organic matter drives soil health and natural soil fertility.

Rotations and soil health

One of the cornerstones of a “good” crop rotation is including grasses and cereals, broadleaf and legume crops, both warm and cool season. To get a “great” crop rotation, one would include spring- and fall-seeded crops, perennials, and annuals. The ultimate goal in utilizing cover crops is to have plants growing in the soil throughout the growing season.

A good crop rotation will increase “soil livestock.” But how does increasing fungi, in particular mycorrhizae, make me money? There is research in southern Manitoba showing that adding phosphate fertilizer to soybeans leads to significant yield increases. Yet on our farm, we are yet to show any yield increase from phosphate. Scientific papers published around the world show that fields with high levels of mycorrhizal infection show low yield response to phosphate fertilizers, where fields with low mycorrhizal infection show a higher yield response. Other crops like flax, corn, cereals, and pulses, respond similarly. High levels of mycorrhizae in the soil may lower your phosphate bill.

Mycorrhizae also help move water around in the soil under drought stress. If the soil surface is covered, and the mycorrhizae population is healthy, crops will handle drought better. The key is to maintain ground cover, keep roots alive throughout the growing season, build organic matter, build soil fertility and maintain nutrient balance.

Cover cropping goals

Cover cropping can be full season, part season or short season growth, depending on goals. A cover crop can be simple or a complex blend of different species. With more diversity comes more stability. For producers looking at cover crops for the first time, simplicity usually takes some of the stress and intimidation out of getting started. As a producer gains experience cover cropping, new goals can be added.

Livestock producers usually see quicker direct benefits, such as animal feed. Either as grazing or hayed forage, there is usually a feed target for a cover crop to fill. This has been done for many years, back before it was “cool.” The difference now is that we are also able to target other goals: recycling nutrients, alleviating compaction, or reducing salinity buildup by choosing species with appropriate growth periods, root growth, top growth and feed characteristics.

How does cover cropping benefit grain producers? Healthy soil biology will assist in plant growth and reduce plant stress. When plants are growing in the soil throughout the growing season, soil microbes have something to grow with.

A cover crop will address production issues. Seeding fast-growing species after crop harvest, or something that will overwinter, will continue to improve soil conditions.

Overwintering cover crops is the next step in management, which is not a big deal. An abundance of nutrients can be recycled or nitrogen fixed by the right species. The main complaints are lack of time and the fear of drying out the soil. Increased soil biology and increased organic matter will ease both fears. The biggest thing is to start changing management.

The whole idea of soil husbandry disappeared from Western Canada in the 1930s. My grandfather was a member of the Saskatchewan Field Husbandry Association. With the advance of science, a lot of that work was left behind. Now, old time agronomy is making its way back.

Taking care of the soil, feeding microbes, is easier and less risky than the continued reliance of over applying chemical inputs. No, this is not a plug for organic or non-GMO production. We conventional producers can learn some easy-to-incorporate management choices from top end organic producers. I like the idea of having a toolbox full of tools I can use, not being stuck using half of the potential tools. It will take some trials to see what you’re your management system. You just need to think of the “livestock” living in your soil.

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1. Setting a goal

The first question that needs to be answered is, “What’s the goal of the cover crop?” This will set up parameters for when to seed, what to seed and how to manage it. Is the cover crop to be used as a rotationally grazed feed stock versus stockpiled and grazed, greenfeed versus swath grazing, snow catch for winter cereals, salinity management, mid season crop loss, or another reason?

Once you’ve established the goal, you can select species. You know what grows locally. This is the base of most situations. Then add diversity. It is amazing to see how the blends have more vigourous growth than monocultures. A monoculture has the same plants growing and has the same roots pushing through the soil at the same rate in the same soil volume competing for the same nutrients and water at the same time. With a well-planned cover crop blend, roots will be growing in all directions, at all times reducing the stress on the crop.

Then you run into areas where nothing, or very little grows. A soil test may be needed to find out what you are dealing with. Or, if you suspect that salinity, for example, is the issue, then select more saline tolerant plants. If there are other issues like weed issues, soil compaction, nutrient loss or erosion concerns, there are a different set of appropriate species. Some of the same species may be grown, maybe at different rates.

2. Choosing a species

Two factors to look at while picking species are cost and efficiency. Effectiveness is hard to measure quantitatively, especially when dealing with specific issues or soil health. Cost is also relative. It’s also hard to value the benefits of improving future crops, salvaging soil or crops, or transitioning crops in a timely way.

The main species we have been using on are farm are proso millet (Crown or red), crimson clover, forage brassica, sunflowers, Phacelia, oat, winter triticale, sorghum Sudan grass, annual ryegrass, tillage radish and conventional Canamaize corn. Buckwheat is on the list of species that we will use more in the future. We can use hairy vetch, but it can have high hard seed counts, which means it may volunteer two to three years after seeding. Plus, it is naturally resistant to glyphosate so it should be managed more carefully in blends.

We have used a couple of different blends on our farm depending on our goals. We have used a proso millet, crimson clover, tillage radish blend as a green feed crop, that we then seed winter triticale into.

• Click here for a cover crop species summary (depending on your browser, you may need to increase size of image when the new window opens)

3. Getting it in the ground

This past year with all of the June rains, anything that was not seeded in May had to wait until mid to late July to get seeded. We assumed we would not be able to get a green feed crop off of those acres, so our seeding rate was reduced somewhat and we added sunflowers to the mix.

By the end of August, there was decent top growth of the mix and seeding Luoma winter Triticale into it was not an issue, yet had good snow catch potential. The other “blend” seeded was straight tillage radish. Our goal was to dry some land out, recapture any nutrients that were leached out, and to evaluate tillage radish’s competitiveness against foxtail barley.

Water stopped flowing across these fields in mid July. We seeded tillage radish the first week of August. By September 5, the radish plants covered the ground, their roots were drilled down about 24 inches, and the soil was firm enough to drive across. Next spring we’ll examine soil tests and foxtail barley.

The biggest problem producers have with tillage radish is seeding too early. Ideally, you can manage the tops by clipping, mowing, grazing, haying, oar a frost three to six weeks after emergence. Seeding in May, June or early July will give the plant enough time to bolt. In Southern Alberta or Manitoba under a normal year, whatever that is, they can be seeded into September. It is not the first frost we are looking at — it is the killing frost.

If they’re seeded earlier, some means of top growth control is required. The results of the radish growth can be seen with a shovel. The fine taproot will drill down about one inch per day. Tuber production occurs in late August and early September, when the plant gives up trying to produce seed and attempts to be a winter annual, producing a nutrient storage vessel. After three nights of -9 C, the plant dies. If it is just basal leaves, by middle of April, there will be very little tillage residue left.

The rest of the variables will be left up to the producer and the year. Successful results, like the rest of what producers do in agriculture, are going to be dependent on the goals we set.

Cover crops are not a silver bullet to fix all problems. It’s just one tool in a toolbox. A hammer is a good tool, but to tighten a nut on a bolt, a wrench may be a better choice. Given a thought-out plan and defined goals, cover crops can save time, money, improve nutrient distribution in the soil, improve soil physical characteristics, provide forage and prevent erosion. These will improve future economics and sustainability.

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May started off with lots of water. The plan was to seed soybeans, grazing corn, a grain corn trial, brown mustard, spring triticale and cover crops. By the end of May, we had seeded 600 acres of soybeans, 1/3 of an acre of grain corn trial, and six acres of grazing corn (we’d intended 35). A field of alfalfa was to be taken out and into cover crop, and our sainfoin field was still producing.

On November 2013, we dormant-seeded 150 acres of alfalfa into canola stubble and cover crop. Canola has exited our cropping plans. Just because we had made money in the past, the risk is not worth growing it.

From the last couple of years’ experience, we do not like or want to mud a crop in. If we mud it in, we are only two inches of rain away from having it drown out.

The next plan was to seed a cover crop into the unseeded acres, use moisture, create vertical drainage into the soil, recapture nutrients leached into the soil, or potentially off the field, and create stubble to seed winter triticale into.

June was a write off for trying to seed anything because of frequent rains. Then June 28 rolled around. Seven inches of rain overnight.

Water stopped running across our fields by the middle of July. The one dormant seeded alfalfa field was set back with the flooding, and foxtail barley took over so we worked it under. Two acres of our six acres of grazing corn flooded out.

Haying season resulted in getting stuck once, I got smart quick, but left some lower areas. The first year alfalfa looked like a field of sow thistle, but underneath we got a good catch of alfalfa. It didn’t get cut as early as I would have liked, but it got done.

We had 120 acres that we could not get to prior to the showers. By the end of July it as overgrown with foxtail barley. The only option we saw was to disk it under with a 14-foot disk. It proved to be an adventure, like everything else — we got stuck numerous times.

With the drier conditions during end of July and early August, the soil dried out enough to allow us to seed cover crops. We seeded 120 acres of straight tillage radish and 425 acres of a blend of tillage radish, red proso millet, sorghum sudangrass, crimson clover and sunflower the first 10 days of August.

Our initial goal was to get a cut of greenfeed off of the five-crop blend, but Mother Nature had other plans. The straight tillage radish crop was seeded to see if it would smother out weeds.

Tillage radish is a crop unlike any other. If it grows for more than six weeks without a frost, clipping, mowing, or graze, it will bolt and want to flower. Cutting the plant resets its clock. If a frost occurs, the plant will stop trying to be a spring annual to become a winter annual. As a spring annual, it will bolt, flower and try to produce seed. As a winter annual, it will produce a larger root and tuber to store nutrients and energy so the plant and try to overwinter. Three nights of -9 C kills the plant. If it has bolted, it will be harder to work with because the bolted plant will have more lignin in the stem.

The key is to seed tillage radish within six weeks of frost. At a six to eight pound seeding rate, it will cover the ground after three weeks, assuming there is moisture.

Until the snow got too deep too see the radish by the end of November, they were still green. The tubers were from one to three inches in diameter, six to 12 inches long.

We got some Luoma winter triticale seeded into the cover crop land. Tillage radish got a little too leafy for my liking but made it work. Next year, I will include more sunflowers in a blend that we are using as a cover crop. We like how it gets quick height, has better salinity tolerance and is killed with the first frost.

Corn grazing did not last long. 20 animals cleaned up the four acres in 30 days. Corn does not like to be flooded. Since there was too much variability in production, this is the first year we will not generate any yield data off of our corn. Where it stayed out of the water, it did well.

Soybean harvest was delayed due to the late September rains, but went smoothly. Early optimism was dashed when we went from the higher land to the lower land. The higher land was yielding between 35 and 50 bushels per acre. Lower land that got extra water ran around 10. Overall we had a 28 bushel per acre average, 38 per cent protein and 19 per cent oil.

Next year, if Drew Lerner’s early 2015 prediction is correct, may get us back into our normal rotation. We will give Azuki beans one more chance and I am looking for some sesame to try. Canola still is not on my list of crops to grow. Keeping on with soybeans, alfalfa, sainfoin, grazing corn, and winter triticale.

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