Category Archives: Dan’s Digs

Mike Plumer Gets Acknowledged for His Contribution to Cover Crop Science

At the recent National No-Till Conference in St. Louis, a number of people were acknowledged for their contributions to agriculture. Mike Plumer was among them, and his recognition is well deserved. If there is ever a candidate for the Cover Crop Hall of Fame, Plumer is it.

Mike has made a career out of helping others, whether as an Extension Agent, Natural Resources Educator, Agronomist or Crop Consultant. Even during his 34 years working for the University of Illinois, he was also farming his own land, researching and testing ideas on his own crops.

Since leaving the University, he has been at the forefront of cover crop innovation. It was he who managed the early field trials of annual ryegrass, when it astonished growers and academics about annual ryegrass’ deep rooting and compaction busting properties.

He started and continues to work with the Illinois Council on Best Management Practices. He was on the ground floor with the Midwest Cover Crop Council. He has helped thousands of growers learn quickly how to employ cover crops in various states, different climates and with many different soil properties. He has given selflessly to big and small audiences, from the Midwest to both U.S. coasts, and from Austria to South Africa.

In recent years, as more government agencies and nonprofit environmental organizations began to recognize the value of cover crops, Mike was a consultant and patient guide in their steep learning curve. He has been a tireless advocate and champion of cover crops in whatever setting he finds himself.

With Mike’s consistent effort, the word spread quickly about cover crop benefits. From only hundreds of acres in cover crops during the 1990s when he began his push for use of annual ryegrass as a cover crop, the number of farms using cover crops has grown geometrically. Recent estimates indicate that between 2 and 4 million acres in the Midwest are planted in cover crops each year. The increases, year over year, indicate that the growth curve is not abating. SARE and the CTIC surveyed farmers and they said there was a 37.75 percent increase in cover crop acres from 2012 to 2013 alone. And according to Practical Farmers of Iowa, the increase in cover crop seed flown onto to farmland grew 200 percent increase between 2010 and 2013.

But Mike has also been a keen observer of best practices and has continued to caution and educate people about making small steps to increase their chances of success. In a quote from a National Wildlife Federation publications on cover crop management, Mike said, “It’s important for farmers to have the right help when they are starting out with cover crops. Because cover crops require a totally different set of management skills to be successful.”

Congratulations, Mike. And thank you.

Planting Annual Ryegrass as a SPRING Cover Crop

It may have begun in Canada, the practice of planting annual ryegrass as a cover crop into knee-high corn. Based on the pioneering work of cover crop innovators like Daniel Briere, an agronomist with Plant Production Quebec, hundreds of northern Corn Belt U. S. farmers are now doing likewise – planting annual ryegrass as a cover crop in the spring.

One of the biggest impediments to cover crop adoption has been planting them in in the fall after harvesting the main cash crop. Especially in the northern Midwest, where harvests can come off the field just before cold weather sets in, planting a fall cover crop has been difficult. Planting in the spring is therefore a great option.

Here’s a video of the equipment that’s being used to broadcast annual ryegrass when your corn is at five or six leaves. After it germinates and gets established, the annual ryegrass goes dormant for most of the summer because it is shaded by the corn. Then, in the fall, it takes off again, after harvest, and stays alive throughout the winter, provided there’s enough snow cover. Then, in the spring, the idea is to kill the annual ryegrass in the weeks before planting the next corn crop.

Although the idea of planting a second crop into the cash crop seems counter intuitive, it looks like the synergy of annual ryegrass and corn builds soil and adds bushels of extra corn at the end of the season.

Another benefit of interseeding is that, during corn harvest, the combine is rolling over the ryegrass, which further protects the soil from compaction and giving the combine added traction.

Managing Annual Ryegrass as a Cover Crop

This past winter, annual ryegrass hardly went into dormancy….it was that mild. Of course, the value to the soil is multiplied in years like this, when ryegrass roots extend to depths of four or five feet.

Soon, it will be time to spay out the ryegrass, and it pays to do it right. Here are some tips for managing it properly. For more detail, click here.

Spray when the ryegrass has broken dormancy, and before it reaches 8 inches. Like lawn grass, if the cover crop looks long enough to mow, then it’s time to spray it with glyphosate.
Use a full rate of glyphosate in order to kill the grass on the first application. Keep an eye out to make sure it’s good and dead and spray again if there’s any regrowth
Wait for the right temperature and daylight to spray. Consistent daytime temps of above 55F is best. Gray, cloudy or rain…delay the spray.

Look at the website above for more details. And you can also download a free annual ryegrass management guide by clicking here.

Soil Health Partnership Grows From a Desire to Thrive – Biologically and Economically!

The National Corngrowers Association started the Midwest Soil Health Partnership three years ago. Here’s what they say about the novel effort, supported at the beginning by Monsanto, The Walton Family Foundation and with technical support from The Nature Conservancy. Among its staff is Dan Towery, an agronomist from Indiana, who has been working with cover crops for decades and has been a consultant to the Oregon Ryegrass Cover Crop project for more than a decade.

This spring, the organization begins in its third year identifying, testing and measuring farm management practices that improve soil health. These include growing cover crops, practicing conservation tillage like no-till or strip-till, and using sophisticated nutrient management techniques.

The program’s goal is to quantify the benefits of these practices from an economic standpoint, showing farmers how healthy soil benefits their bottom line. They also have positive environmental benefits, like protecting water from nutrient runoff.

Twenty-five more farms have joined the research effort, which could change the way the whole farming industry views agricultural best practices. The number of participating farms expands to 65 this year, located in eight Midwestern states. Data from farms will play a key role in widespread changes for improving soil health, said Towery, the Indiana field manager with partner Hans Kok, PhD.

From the Soil Health Partnership website, here is a goal statement:

Our ultimate goal is to measure and communicate the economic and environmental benefits of different soil management strategies, and provide a set of regionally specific, data‑driven recommendations that farmers can use to improve the productivity and sustainability of their farms. To that end, we plan to do the following:

Recruit a network of demonstration farms
that will serve as showcases for other farmers to investigate innovative soil management practices, including reduced tillage systems, cover crops and advanced nutrient management.
Establish research protocols that will allow us to measure the connection between a diverse range of soil management practices and soil health.
Publish findings and recommendations
that highlight the economic and environmental benefits of healthy soil.
Support networking and technical assistance
that will help growers and their advisors make decisions that will result in positive changes for the profitability of their operation and the sustainability of the soil.

Beating Compaction with Annual Ryegrass

An article this week in No-Till Farmer, about a well-attended seminar at the recent National No-Till Conference. Click here for the whole article.

Beating Compaction

While radishes get a reputation for being a compaction buster, Hans Kok and Dan Towery say annual ryegrass is probably the No. 1 cover crop for resolving compaction.

Kok, coordinator of the Indiana Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative, says annual ryegrass does a better job in the long run of breaking up compaction layers because its fine root system is able to cover a larger area.

“Radishes have that fine root network too, but it’s usually that one tuber that goes through,” he explains.

On compacted glacial-till soil in Indiana, Towery, a no-till consultant with Ag Conservation Solutions in Lafayette, Ind., dug a hole in April where there was 9-inch-tall annual ryegrass. He found its roots went 51 inches deep.

One of the most extreme cases of compaction they saw was in southern Illinois on hard, fragipan soils. Kok says the growers there had 18 inches of topsoil, and their corn and soybean roots couldn’t go any deeper.

But 5 years of annual ryegrass started to break through that compaction layer, and now the growers have 3 feet of topsoil for their corn and soybeans, Kok says.

Cover Crops and Carbon Sequestration

The recent Climate conference in Paris included talk about cover crops and carbon sequestration. With a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, scientists are looking at ways to improve the soil’s capacity to regain some of what it has lost to cultivation and oxidation. Here’s a section of an article from an agronomist at Yale University, speaking about work that Ohio State’s Rattan Lal has done.

According to Rattan Lal, director of Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, the world’s cultivated soils have lost between 50 and 70 percent of their original carbon stock, much of which has oxidized upon exposure to air to become CO2. Now, armed with rapidly expanding knowledge about carbon sequestration in soils, researchers are studying how land restoration programs in places like the former North American prairie, the North China Plain, and even the parched interior of Australia might help put carbon back into the soil.

Dan Towery said that cover crops have lots of promise, bringing carbon back into and storing it in the soil. But, he added that no-till and cover cropping are still new, and gains by one farmer who steadfastly improves the carbon base can quickly be lost again. “All it takes is one tillage trip to lose about 90 percent of what you’ve gained in a decade of cover crops and no-till,” he said. The carbon, even after a decade, isn’t much deeper than two inches. And, there’s no guarantee that, with the sale or rental of that farm, successive farmers will continue to abide with that practice.

So, the idea of paying people to sequester carbon will have to wait some time, he said, until the management practices have settled firmly on the side of conservation tillage.

Dan Towery to Present on Cover Crop Limitations

The 24th Annual National No-Till Conference will take place Jan 6 – 9, 2016 at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. Dan Towery and a close working colleague, Hans Kok, will present on Jan 7th. here’s a description of that classroom event at the show.

“Possibilities and Limitations of Cover Crops: Fixing Tough Conditions.” With the rising popularity of cover crops, no-tillers are finding they may be able to fix many problems in the soil, such as resolving compaction, reducing diseases like pythium by improving the soil’s aggregate stability and controlling certain glyphosate-resistant weeds.

But there are limits to what they can fix and how long it may take, as well as growing conditions, to see results. Hans Kok, coordinator of the Indiana Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative, and Dan Towery, no-till consultant with Ag Conservation Solutions in Lafayette, Ind., will discuss both the possibilities and limitations of cover crops. – See more at: http://www.no-tillfarmer.com/articles/5152?page=2#sthash.68EvKpZY.dpuf

Cover Crops and Carbon Penalty

In a recent issue of Ag Web, sponsored by Farm Journal magazine, an article written by Darrell Smith covered some ideas and advice given by the magazine’s resident agronomist, Ken Ferrie. The following paragraphs caught my eye:

Cover crops can reduce corn yield by acting as weeds in the row and by tying up soil nutrients when they decompose. “If cover crop plants are allowed to grow in the corn row, the corn plants see them as weeds, and it creates stress,” Ferrie says. “Stress lowers yield potential. The longer weeds and corn plants grow together in the row, the greater the reduction in ear size. Even if you take out the weeds, or the cover crop, a few weeks later, the damage has been done. Yield potential has been lost, and you will never get it back.”

He goes on to say, “Another source of stress on young corn plants is the carbon penalty. When cover crops are killed, the influx of carbon in the residue leads to a higher population of soil microorganisms. They temporarily tie up soil nitrogen and other nutrients, leaving corn plants to go hungry in the critical early weeks. If a cover crop has a high carbon/nitrogen ratio, the longer it’s allowed to grow in the spring, the more residue and the higher the carbon penalty.”

This seems to make sense until you look at a couple of basics: In most cases, cover crops are planted in the fall, just after harvest or, increasingly, when the corn is still standing but already matured. (An exception is the relatively experimental “interseeding” of cover crops in the spring, after the corn is about knee high).Thus, the planting of a cover crop in August or September or October would have no bearing whatsoever on yield.

It appears that he may have planted another cover crop in the spring, because the fall planting had winter killed. Then,because of the bad spring weather (2014), he didn’t plant the corn until the end of May, six weeks after normal. He planted into a relatively new cover crop which, of course, would compete for available nitrogen. Then, as it turns out, he didn’t put any ‘starter’ nitrogen on the corn when he planted, but instead waited until weeks later when he sprayed glyphosate to kill the cover crop.

When he concludes that the reason for poor yield was because of “carbon penalty” (residue from dead cover crops creating more microorganisms and thus tying up nitrogen) it may in fact be more due to the anomalies in his experiment that year.

In any case, it’s important to remember to give corn plants a boost of nitrogen when planting – somewhere between 30 and 40 units. And if you’re planting into an existing cover crop, make sure you add the N then, not waiting until you burn down the cover crop, perhaps a month later.

NRCS Funds Expanded Use of Cover Crops

From No-Till Magazine’s managing editor this week, an article about expanded use of federal taxpayer funds for establishing agricultural conservation measures. Click here for the whole article. Below, a portion of that article.

It’s becoming ever more clear that the NRCS believes no-tilling, cover crops and more precise grazing methods will be crucial to shoring up the declining Ogallala aquifer.

And it’s also clear farmers in the southern Plains will continue to feel pressure to reduce or eliminate their dependence on irrigation, or adopt more efficient technology.

The NRCS announced this month that it will invest $8 million in the ongoing Ogallala Aquifer Initiative (OEI) in 2016 to help farmers and ranchers conserve water in the Ogallala’s footprint. This is up from $6.5 million that was spent for 2015.

The NRCS is also adding two new management areas for the OEI:

Middle Republican Natural Resource District: The project in southwestern Nebraska addresses groundwater quantity and quality concerns, and will enable participants to voluntarily implement practices to conserve irrigation water and improve groundwater quality.
Oklahoma Ogallala Aquifer Initiative: Among other things, this project will help landowners implement conservation practices — including crop residue and tillage management — that decrease water use. One goal is helping farmers convert from irrigated to dryland farming.

The NRCS already has focus areas in Nebraska, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas and Colorado, which you can read more about by clicking here.

The NRCS says it’s continuing to address problems with the aquifer by working with farmers to build soil health through seeding cover crops and implementing no-till practices, which will improve water-holding capacity and buffer roots from higher temperatures.

Spring Seeding of Annual Ryegrass in Knee-high Corn – an Update

The spring seeding of cover crops in Quebec began five or six years ago and Dan Towery had grave concerns. How does it make sense to consider adding annual ryegrass between rows of knee-high corn in June?

But after repeated trips to Quebec to witness the successes – including a bump in corn production – Dan is more than cautiously optimistic. He’s now pushing forward with vigor various trials with spring “interseeding” of cover crops in the northern Corn Belt.

Last year was the first limited trial and it was successful, both in terms of the cover crop surviving but also in terms of corn production. Perhaps the biggest benefit of a spring cover crop seeding: by doing the planting in the spring, it eases farmers’ fall schedule, pressed as they are with corn harvest and weather suitable for establishing a cover crop planted so late in the year. Pictured below is an older harrow that was retrofitted (removed some teeth and adding a Gandy linear seeder on top) that was funded by the Oregon Ryegrass Commission, a pioneer in cover crop research trials and education in the past 20 years.

Last year, in different control plots, the bump in corn production over adjacent fields was 6 bu/ac using annual ryegrass, and 15 bu/ac using hairy vetch. “We’re not sure why the hairy vetch was so much more beneficial to the corn production,” he said, “but my hunch is that hairy vetch being a nitrogen fixer, there’s something going on with the mycorrhizal (fungal) hyphae in conjunction with the corn roots.” We’ll be looking at learning more that connection this year.”

This year, Towery is overseeing the expansion of the test plots “in the northern one-third of the Corn Belt.” Towery said he’s curious how far south the practice will be tolerated. “The more heat, the more dryness, the less likely we’ll see a successful spring cover crop program.”