Perhaps you’ve already seen these dozen videos about annual ryegrass, both about how to plant and manage it, but also the benefits of having a cover crop on your soil. Click here if you want to review them...the link here is to the first one, and once on the YouTube channel, you can find the others easily by typing Annual Ryegrass in the search engine.
Here are a couple other videos about annual ryegrass, produced by Dale Strickler.
The advice about using cover crops for the first time is almost written in stone: “Start with a small parcel.”
John Werries, a third generation farmer from Chapin, Illinois, had a few things going for him that allowed him to skip the advice entirely. He talked to some long time cover croppers, he had done a lot of studying and had attended educational forums on cover crop management, and he wasn’t getting any younger. “I was 65 when I started cover crops. I may not have had a decade to experiment on a small scale,” he said.
Together, John, his son Dean and their neighbor, Andy Shireman, formed a cover crop business, Chapin Cover Crops. They went in on the purchase of a 40’ air seeder and air cart, and proceeded in 2012 to plant the entire Werries 3800 acres, over 2000 of Shireman’s acres and 1700 acres of custom seeding.
“You couldn’t have asked for a more perfect year,” he said. “We got an early start, drilling the annual ryegrass (Aug. 22) right behind the combine, and we were done with seeding the acreage by the end of September. After the first seeding, we got about four inches of gentle rain in the span of two days. I’m a private pilot and so it was a joy when, some weeks later, I flew over the property and saw all that solid, dense green!”
John’s land is almost all in corn. He strip tills and so the cover crop was primarily an aide in reducing erosion, especially on the half of his acres that are in rolling hills. “I just hate the idea of erosion,” he said.
The spring of 2013 was a very wet one, with nearly 15 inches in April and May. “I was so impressed with the annual ryegrass,” he said. There was some runoff but absolutely no erosion.”
The other benefit he saw immediately was in corn production. “In 2012, it was a drought year and we had a ‘whole-farm’ average yield of 133 bu/ac,” he recalled. “That was the worst corn harvest since 1988. But a year later, the average in 2013 was 234 bu/ac…a whole 100 bushels per acre better!” Besides the weather, he attributes some of that increase to the nutrients sequestered by the annual rye grass.
The cover crop seeding of fall, 2013, was close to a disaster. “We flew on 1000 acres and drilled the rest, and virtually nothing came up,” he said. “We had a very dry fall followed by a brutal winter, very cold and no snow cover.” But the harvest this fall has been even better average than last year. He attributes some of that to the improvement in soil health from years of strip till corn, no till beans, and at least one successful year of annual rye grass.
This fall, another wet one, has presented difficulties both for harvesting corn and seeding annual ryegrass. Since early August, his farm has gotten more than 17 inches of rain. About two weeks after flying on the first 1000 acres, the area got a hard five inches of rain and John’s farm has seen no erosion. Since then, he’s flown on most of his acres with annual ryegrass and feels cautiously optimistic about the survival of the cover crop this winter.
“I’m now less worried about year to year differences,” he said, “and more focused on the long term. I go out there now and, my gosh, you wouldn’t believe the number of earthworm holes. That’s evidence of better organic matter and less compaction. I tell you,” he added, “there’s no turning me around on cover cropping at this point. It’s a winning solution.”
The last blog post discussed the best planting dates for annual ryegrass, depending on whether you drill or broadcast with plane or high clearance equipment.
Many others are broadcasting annual ryegrass seed (after corn harvest) mixed in with manure slurry. This is a great solution for those raising livestock, looking for a way to recycle manure and a great source of nutrients for the young grass.
In some places, with ideal conditions, you can get a bit of grazing or a cutting before the end of the year. Otherwise, the return out of dormancy next spring will allow a grazing or cutting of annual ryegrass.
Using annual ryegrass as a forage – whether grazed or haylage – can provide additional savings on livestock feed, while providing a high quality food.
Here’s a link to a video on the application of annual ryegrass seed with a manure slurry.
If you use a no-till drill to plant annual ryegrass, you get better seed to soil contact, but the timing becomes crucial because of crop harvest variability. In the past few years, corn and bean harvests have been later and, in some cases, too late to plant annual ryegrass.
Planting with aerial seeding – plane or high-clearance equipment – can be done while corn and beans are still in the field. The seed lies dormant until sufficient rain germinates the cover crop. But because you’re seeding into standing corn or beans, you must use more seed.
The range of effective seeding rates is from about 12 lb/ac to about double that, if you’re broadcasting the seed. Some worry that applying too much seed will make it more difficult planting corn or beans into the cover crop residue the next spring. Thus, those people favor a lighter seeding rate. Even if the annual ryegrass looks thin in its top growth, the deep mat of roots are still doing their job in the soil, they say.
Others say that a heavier seeding rate is good insurance against harsher winters. Those with interest in using annual rygrass for forage will certainly want to plant at the upper rate of application.
In either case, annual ryegrass is among the least costly and most effective of cover crops. The cost for seed and application can easily be made up in the gains in soil health and increased crop production.
For more information about timing and rates of seed application, click here for a comprehensive brochure.
Looking at Crimson Clover in Cover Crop Mix with Annual Ryegrass
Crimson clover’s peak potential to fix Nitrogen is just before it blooms. It can fix the most nitrogen (up to 135b/ac) in the soil at that time. But in a normal weather year, Central Midwest growers would terminate the crimson clover in mid April, ahead of planting corn. This is well before bloom, thus limiting the amount of N actually produced.
This spring, being so late, Indiana grower Mike Starkey decided to leave the cover crop on his field a month longer than normal. The cover crop mix was crimson clover, annual ryegrass, Austrian winter pea and dicon radish. As you can see in the photos below (5/19/14), the clover is in full bloom. Purdue University students were there taking samples on the 80 acre parcel to determine the N content.
While many in the Midwest experienced a tough cover crop year because of the harsh winter, this parcel fared well due to the tree line which acted as a windbreak. A minus 20 to minus 30 degree windchill with no snow cover seems to be the threshold at which winterkill occurs. Many areas had significant snow but the wind blew the snow off of some areas.
In a series of videos produced by Sustainable Ag Research & Education (SARE): called Cover Crop Innovators, Midwest farmers talk about their experience with annual ryegrass and other cover crops.Click here for the whole series:
Or, click here to see the video on Indiana farmer Jamie Scott
Click here to see the video on Indiana farmer Dan DeSutter
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.
Managing Winter Cover Crops in Corn and Soybean Cropping Systems
DuPont Pioneer Agronomy Research Summary – 2014 (Click here for full report)
| Table 1. Potential benefits of cover crops. | ||||||||||||||||||
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In recent years, interest in adding cover crops to corn and soybean cropping systems has increased as their potential benefits have become more widely recognized. Most of these benefits are realized over time as their ongoing use improves soil quality and function (Table 1). Thus, cover crops are best viewed as a long-term investment in soil productivity.
Cover Crop Selection – Grasses, Legumes, Brassicas
Grasses, including winter cereals such as rye, wheat, barley and triticale, are the most widely used cover crops in corn and soybean cropping systems. Winter cereals are typically planted in late summer through late fall and produce a small to moderate amount of root and above-ground biomass before going dormant in the winter. Vigorous growth resumes in early spring, and large amounts of biomass are produced by mid to late spring. Some growers prefer non-winterhardy cereals like oats, which establish rapidly in the fall but winterkill and leave behind little residue to manage in the spring. Annual ryegrass is another option if spring residue levels are a concern.
Annual ryegrass is among the most popular cover crops. As such, it will be among the key elements in a Cover Crop learning session at the Commodity Classic this year, in San Antonio, TX. The session will cover both the trend in cover crop use nationally, but also specifics on how to make cover crops work for your acreage.
The Conservation Technology Information Center and DuPont Pioneer are sponsoring the session. Here’s a link to a full story and details about attending
The learning center session, “Cover Your Assets: Improve Productivity, Efficiency and Soil with Cover Crops,” will take place Feb. 28 at 1:45 p.m. in the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Room 217BC.
The presenters include Mike Plumer and Jamie Scott, both of whom have been long time annual ryegrass advocates. Mike worked for decades for the U. of IL as an Extension Educator. Jamie is an Indiana farmer, whose business now includes providing annual ryegrass seed flown onto about 60,000 acres each year.
Additional experts are Rob Myers, regional director of extension programs for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s North Central Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and Karen Scanlon, CTIC executive director, who will moderate the session.
“Cover crops are an exciting topic that continues to gain the spotlight,” Scanlon said.
Nick Bowers looked at sales of cover crop seed from his Oregon farm this year and declared “we’re up from last year but the growth has leveled off a bit, compared to previous years.”
“The good news of cover crops has encouraged newcomers to try planting them,” he said. “But with adverse weather in the Midwest, corn and beans came off the field 2 – 3 weeks late this year. That means getting a cover crop on before cold weather was more of a risk, and I think that’s what held newcomers off somewhat,” he theorized.
Bowers has witnessed the phenomenal growth in sales of annual ryegrass and other cover crops as an Oregon grower. Before he and his partner began direct sales to the Midwest, he was involved in years of on-farm research as a member of the Oregon Ryegrass Seed Growers Commission. It was the Commission’s early and consistent cover crop education and promotion that helped to launch the current boom in cover crop use, he said. During those years, he and other Oregon grass seed growers donated tons of seed and thousands of hours of their time, working with cooperating farmers in Illinois and Indiana, to find out how cover crops could positively impact corn and bean production there.
“Those more accustomed to planting cover crops weren’t phased by the late harvest this year,” he continued. “They applied the seed – most often by plane – into standing corn and beans, then hoped that rain would take care of the rest.”
Based on contact with his Midwest customers, Bowers said that it appears that annual ryegrass and other cover crops are doing well, even with the weather not being ideal.
He said that while Indiana and Illinois have been leaders in cover crop adoption, other Midwest states are coming along quickly. In January, his partner will be at the Iowa Cover Crop Clinic, in Des Moines, Jan. 27 – 30, in conjunction with the annual Power Show, scheduled for the 28th – 31st.