Tag Archives: Mike Plumer

Annual Ryegrass Video Series – for beginners and intermediate cover crop users

The experts said it back in 1998, that no-till and cover crops were a winning combination for corn and soybean growers. Ten years later, a series of videos were done to introduce the idea and bring basic understanding of the what and how of cover crops. Back in 2005, the idea that a cover crop could sink winter roots down to 50 inches or more was revolutionary in the ag industry. Today, the practice is becoming widespread in the Midwest. The videos stand up to the test of time, and continue to be a solid source of information.

In the first video segment, you can get a glimpse of the main characteristics of annual ryegrass, and a couple of its major benefits.

Root depth: “Better than a deep ripper, in terms of its ability to break up compaction,” said Dan Towery, of Ag Conservation Solutions, an Indiana consultant on soil health.”Far deeper than other cover crops,” said Mike Plumer a former university agronomist and pioneer in cover crop development in the Midwest.

Nitrogen scavenger: those who use livestock manure in the field benefit by having the nutrient stay in the field.
“Annual ryegrass is a great nitrogen scavenger,” said another cover crop pioneer in Indiana, Dan DeSutter, …keeping it in the field instead of sending it down the tile lines in the spring with runoff.”

If the videos are of some interest, perhaps you would also like more information about the science and the management of annual ryegrass. If so, click here for a free brochure. Or, click here for a library of information on the annual ryegrass website.

National No-Till Conference – 25th Anniversary – Features Lots of Cover Crop Ed.

This year’s annual National No-Till Conference – Jan 10 – 13 – in St. Louis is perhaps the best ever. Here’s the link to the website. Click on the image below to see the entire prgram listing.

For you cover crop fans, here’s a listing of the speakers, classes and roundtable discussions about cover crops. There are plenty available on each of the three days of the conference.

Wednesday

Speakers

Ray McCormick, Indiana, 2400 acre grower, all no-till w/cover crop
J.C. Cahill – U of Alberta…how plants talk to each other and how knowing that might be important for your farm.

Classes

Ray Weil, U of Maryland soil scientist

Improve crop access to water and nutrients
Keep more N on your farm – research on how cover crops help N mgmt.
Boost soil bio processes in deeper layers

Ray McCormick, Indiana, 2400 acres, all no-till with cover crops

Adapting equipment for use in seeding cover crops
How to do it inexpensively ($13/a).

Dan Towery and Hans Kok, Indiana/Illinois

Interseeding cover crops into corn
Adding wheat to your rotation
Planting 8 – 15 way cover crop cocktail after wheat…and how that could produce a double digit increase in corn and soybean yields while cutting your N application rates in half.

Egon Zunckel, South Africa

Mitigating poor water infiltration, erosion and stagnant yields with a variety of practices, including cover crops
Introduction of livestock to help manage large amounts of crop residue.

Seth Watkins, Iowa

Cover crops, prairie strips, buffers, native grasses, terracing, crop rotation and rotational livestock grazing – protecting soils while building organic matter quickly and boosting profits.

Jim Johnson, Noble Foundation soils consultant

Grazing cover crops – how to get started
Research results from a variety of states.

Ten No-Till Round-table discussions on Cover Crops, including:

From the North Plains states, to NE and Mid Atlantic
Great Lakes and Ontario
Southern and High Plains
Midwest states: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri.

Mike Plumer – Making Sense of Cover Crop Mixes

When does one cover crop – or two or three – make more sense than a cocktail of mixes?
How to balance cost with needs?
Determine what soils need before making decisions about seed.

Thursday

Joe Breker, ND grower (spoke at inaugural No-Till Conference in 1993)

Cover crops in northern climates
Slash input costs with improved organic matter, banding fertilizer and cover crops.

Mike Plumer – Tips for Terminating cover Crops more effectively

How to do it effectively and save yourself headaches?
How weather, seed varieties, growth states and herbicide choices factor in?
Why to avoid the Variety Not Stated (VNS) label?

Alan Mindermann, Oklahoma

Use cover crops to help mitigate the effects of unpredictable weather and limited moisture
How to track moisture and herbicide applications while making rotation decisions?

Robert Kremer, Ag Research Center, MO

Impact of cover crops on suppressing weeds and weed seed banks.

Roundtable discussions

Making the Right moves with Cover Crop mixes
Seeing the Potential in Cereal Rye Seeding
Getting out of the Starting Gate with Annual Ryegrass
Turning Up No-Till Diversity with Radishes

Friday

Round-table discussions

Tips, Tools for Timely Cover Crop Seeding
Cover Crops that Cut Your Fertilizer Bill.

Randy McElroy, Sustainability researcher at Monsanto Co.

Transform soil with a variety of tools, including cover crops.

Mike Plumer – Granddaddy of Modern-day Cover Crop Advocacy

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before we had met Mike Plumer, he already had more than a decade of advocacy and research into no-till farming and cover crops, especially annual ryegrass. At the time, Mike was an Extension Educator with the University of Illinois, a post he held for 34 years..

We, in Oregon, where 90 percent of the world’s ryegrass seed is grown, had no idea that Mike Plumer was about to give the industry of agriculture an immeasurable gift, while giving the annual ryegrass seed growers a new reason to get up in the morning.

Plumer, working with an innovative Hamilton County, Illinois farmer named Ralph “Junior” Upton, helped quantify the benefits of annual ryegrass in “siltpan” (Bluford) soil. Upton was concerned about the productivity on parts of his 1800 acre farm, where the compacted soil restricted the root growth of corn and soybeans. He wondered if going no-till and adding cover crops might improve productivity.

Plumer began testing on Upton’s farm and quickly discovered what we in Oregon didn’t know – that annual ryegrass roots grow through and permeate compacted soil. Better than that, the roots then extend downwards to a much as five feet, creating new pathways to moisture and nutrients for corn and bean crops to follow.

Since 2004, Upton has seen dramatic changes in his corn yields., according to a USDA profile on him. He says no-till saves him around $15 an acre. Using cover crops costs $8-$20 dollars an acre but it is well worth it. The amount of organic matter in Upton’s soils started at less than 1 percent (.81). That level is now up to 3 or 4 percent. “And that’s exactly what I needed for my soils on those fields,” Upton said.

Since then, Plumer has experimented all over the Midwest (as well as contributing to agriculture internationally) and become the best known cover crop advisor in the country. Below are a couple of very informative power point presentations developed by Plumer, which outline both the benefits and the precautions of annual ryegrass and other cover cropping system. Visit the annual ryegrass by clicking here.

Managing Annual Ryegrass

Cover Crops in Illinois: Why Use Them?

Illinois Makes Strides in Conservation Tillage and Cover Crops

The American Farmland Trust says this about the Midwest’s heritage in agriculture:

With flat prairies, plentiful water, and rich, deep soils, the Midwest is one of the most intensely farmed regions in the world. We depend on it for many of our grocery staples – from corn and soybeans to wheat and meat.

But the Midwest’s abundance of fertile farmland has sometimes led us to take it for granted. We’re rapidly paving over some of the most productive soils and farmland in the world.

At the same time, tons of prime topsoil washes away – and we can’t afford to lose it. In the Midwest, we need to save the land – not just by the acre but also by the inch.

Illinois, 2nd in the nation in production of corn and soybeans, has been somewhat late to the table on soil conservation methods. Cover crop pioneer Mike Plumer worked for decades for Illinois’ major ag university as an Extension educator and agronomist. Despite his untiring advocacy for no-till and cover crops, his university seemed indifferent and even adversarial to his claim that conservation practices were the future of agriculture. Adverse to change, some believe that quality soil will continue without fail, and what dips in productivity one experiences, you can augment with chemistry.

Another Midwest pioneer in cover crop practices, Dan Towery, hails from Indiana, but his work has taken him far afield, and also in close-by partnership with Plumer. His current involvement in a NRCS and SERE project in Illinois, however, spells good news for the day when Illinois will hit its stride with its neighbors, advocating soil conservation, better soil management and improved water quality..

A sign of things on the move in Illinois is the information available from the NRCS office. CLICK here for a look.

And, through NRCS and EQIP, funding is available this year for Illinois growers interested in doing more to save the quality of their soil through conservation measures, like cover crops. CLICK here for an application, courtesy of the Illinois Council on Best Management Practices.

Kentucky Researchers Praise Annual Ryegrass

Annual Ryegrass Dispatches with Fragipan Problems, They Say.

Midwest farmers who have been working with annual ryegrass for some years as a cover crop know that annual ryegrass busts up fragipan (and other soil compactions). They have probably seen for themselves how annual ryegrass as a cover crop then allows corn and soybeans roots to access deeper soil moisture and nutrients.That boosts production, as we’ve seen now for about 20 years.

Mike Plumer, a long-time pioneer in no-till ag and cover crop systems, discovered the deep rooting aspects of annual ryegrass back in the 1990s, when he was still working as an agronomist for the Univ. of Illinois Extension. He and his cooperating farmers also discovered that the roots grow right through compacted soils. In subsequent years, they noticed a yield increase in crops in those same fields.

In a recent article in No-Till Magazine, researchers at the University of Kentucky did both laboratory and field trials using annual ryegrass on soils with fragipan. Here are a number of paragraphs from that article.

Soil fragipans exist in 2.7 million acres in Kentucky and in 50 million acres in the U.S. In Kentucky, the average depth of the fragipan layer in the soil is about 20-24 inches. This results in a shallow soil that limits crops’ yield potential due to low water-holding capacity. This is especially true during dry growing seasons or droughts. These same soils are easily saturated with water in the winter, which limits yields on cool-season crops such as wheat.

Breaking down the fragipan would increase the soil depth and should significantly boost grain yields in the state, similar to the boost farmers received from implementing no-till production.

Four years into the research project, Grove and fellow UK soil scientists Lloyd Murdock, Tasios Karathanasis and Chris Matocha have found that annual ryegrass and some chemical combinations appear to break down the fragipan.

In the lab, Karathanasis submersed chunks of fragipan in several different solutions, one of which was a ryegrass extract.

“Within 2-4 weeks we began to see the ryegrass extract break down the fragipan,” he said. “Not only does ryegrass have a deep root system that can penetrate the pan, but it also releases a chemical or chemicals that can help break it.”

UK soil scientists have planted annual ryegrass as a cover crop in grain fields followed by either corn or soybeans for the past three growing seasons with the fourth round now in the ground. The first year when annual ryegrass was followed by corn, there was no yield difference. The second year when it was followed by soybeans, there was a 25% yield increase in the soybeans. The third year, the researchers followed the ryegrass with soybeans again and there was a slight, but not significant, yield increase.

UK researchers traveled to Hamilton County, Illinois, to take soil samples from a field that had been planted in a ryegrass cover crop since 2000 and followed every year with no-till corn. Mike Plumer had used a part of this field in some of his earlier cover crop studies.

They found the fragipan layer to be much deeper in the soil profile in the fields with ryegrass. More encouraging news came when the farmer told them about his yields.

“When the study started in 2000, the farmer’s yields were 15 bushels an acre below the county average. His fields are now averaging 30 bushels more per acre than the county average,” Murdock said. “We really do not know how well this field represents our situation in Kentucky, but this gives us significant encouragement that we are beginning to prove that annual ryegrass is effective and will give significant results with accumulative years of a ryegrass cover crop.”

Herbicide Carryover in Cover Crops – New Free Guides

In the past couple of years, there has been increasing concern about the impact of residual herbicides in the field hampering or killing cover crops, including annual ryegrass.

Mike Plumer, a pioneer in the cover crop renaissance in the Midwest, has published a handy guide to specific residual herbicides and his observation about their affect on different cover crops.

Click here for a selection of publications about the herbicide carryover issue..

Mike Plumer’s guide is near the top. It comes up as a Word document
University of Wisconsin Extension
Penn State University
Purdue University

Annual Ryegrass Roots – What’s Going on There?

Pioneering cover crop use in the 1990s, University of Illinois Extension educator Mike Plumer discovered something that surprised everybody. Annual ryegrass has a root structure that grows to depths of more than five feet over winter, while the top growth is pretty much dormant.

One of annual ryegrass’ most compelling features is that deep rooting system, because it breaks up compaction of all kinds, and in doing so, it also helps bring nutrients deeper in the soil profile up to the surface. This not only helps crops thrive, it also reduces the amount of nutrient inputs needed.

So, it’s unclear why Cornell and Michigan State universities still have printed information about annual ryegrass stating that annual ryegrass has “a shallow” rooting system.

In fact, the plant DOES have a shallow root mass, which makes it valuable for preventing erosion. But what they don’t say is that annual ryegrass roots also grow to depths of five feet. And this is equally important, for reasons stated above.

In sum, the combined root mass of annual ryegrass also provide another benefit: helping to build organic matter in depleted soils. Once the plant is terminated, in springtime just before planting corn or soybeans, all that root matter decays and becomes the basis for a healthy population of microorganisms and a more friable soil.

(In the photo above, growers are inspecting deep channels created by annual ryegrass roots, which allow corn roots more penetration into the soil following those same channels. Thus, corn plants can better tolerate dry weather because they can reach deeper into soil for needed moisture.)

Plumer said that because of long-term tillage practices, plus tiling fields for drainage and not planting cover crops, Midwest soils have lost half or more of their organic matter. The good news is that for every additional percentage point of organic matter you can add back into the soil, you’re adding back about 1000 pounds of nitrogen per acre!

Annual ryegrass and other cover crops help to raise the organic level back up, though it takes years of consistent cover crop use to make up for the decades of less productive management methods including heavy tillage.

Cover Crop Market News – Oregon and Midwest

The Winter 2015 edition of Oregon Seed magazine discusses the trend in cover crop seed sales in the Midwest. The quote is from Dan Towery, an independent cover crop consultant and longtime conservation tillage educator.

For his part, Mike Plumer said that the 2014 dip doesn’t mean a decline in cover crop seed sales or the expansion of the practice of cover cropping. Plumer is another pioneer cover crop researcher and educator, formerly with the University of Indiana Extension Service.

Cover Crops – Annual Ryegrass Sales Grow Even in Bad Weather

Cover cropping continues to grow in popularity and in acreage simply because it builds soil quality, improves yields and adds to profits.

That mother nature doesn’t always cooperate hasn’t diminished the appetite for producers seeking to get on the most popular new farming trend in a half century.

In a presentation a couple years ago, cover crop pioneer Mike Plumer, showed the reasons why cover crops are increasingly important as a farm management tool, particularly in the Midwest. Mono-culture crops have starved the soil of nutrients while sending immense quantities of soil into nearby waterways, eventually contributing to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the Earth’s largest known dead zones due to heavy pollution from farm runoff into the Mississippi river.

Beginning in 1995, the Oregon Ryegrass Commission, working with Plumer and a handfull of farmers, began to experiment with annual ryegrass in barren cornfields over winter. Since then, Oregon growers have created more winter hardy annual ryegrass grass varieties, as well as finding other cover crops, like radish and crimson clover.

Though the percentage of farm acreage in the Midwest committed to cover crops is still below 10 percent, it’s impressive that cover crops now cover millions of acres of corn and soybean acres, building soil quality, preventing erosion and improving production yields.

This past fall, seed dealers and distributors were ready. But the wet conditions and late harvest prevented some from getting the fields planted, according to Dan Towery, another cover crop consultant and colleague of Plumer.

For those times, farmers are increasingly going to new methods of planting cover crops: flown onto standing crops late in the season, for example, or broadcast with modified high-clearance sprayers equipped with seeders. Still others are trying a novel approach called interseeding, where annual ryegrass is planted in the SPRINGTIME, rather than the fall. Click here to find out more about that program.

SARE Ties with DuPont-Pioneer on Cover Crops

In February, a select group of 300 cover crop experts gathered in Omaha to discuss the prospect of massively enlarging the number of cover crop acres in the Midwest.

At present, there’s an estimated 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 acres of corn and soybean cropland now being improved with cover crops each year. The meeting’s purpose – to explore how to expand that number to 20 million acres in the next six years.

Click here to see presentations of innovative growers who are showing the way how we’ll get there.