How Can I Afford Not To?
Let’s go back to our first cover crop and talk a little about the results.
Our first cover crop of rye was great. It was thick and lush, growing extremely well. Rye is like a point guard that not only can efficiently move the ball down court but can also pop the three pointers. They’ll make you look good.
We planned to plant the fields that were in rye to cotton. When we were about four weeks from our anticipated planting day the cover crop was terminated. Four weeks? I thought about two weeks was the target. Comfort level is part of the equation also and I was scared to death. When deciding when to terminate the covercrop all I could hear in my mind was “What kind of fool farmer would plant where he can’t see the dirt?”
When planting day for the fields came, we pulled into the first field, dropped the planter and proceeded. I immediately started to follow the planter and check for seed placement and seed depth. We made an adjustment to the planter to increase seed depth maybe one fourth of an inch and resumed planting. The placement and seed depth were fine, and the cotton came up to a good stand within a few days.
One of the observations was that like the black oats on my friend’s farm the previous year, the rye had helped mellow up or soften the soil which became an important result of the cover crop. Why is this important? In conventional tillage after a rain event the soil will tend to form a crust at the surface that can be a huge problem for the seedlings attempting to break through to the sunlight. Have you ever made a mud pie? Wet some dirt, pat the mud into a pie and let it lay in the sun and dry, that’s a mud pie. Tasty. Crusting is like the whole surface of the field is a mud pie. The dirt dries out, gets hard and can become impenetrable for seedlings trying to make it out of the ground. Over time, as we progressed with the use of cover crops, the crusting issue that had been a problem during conventional tillage had disappeared. At this point in the journey, time savings, erosion control, and reduction of crusting were front and center as advantages.
It was mentioned earlier that attending seminars and field days are great resources for education and they are invaluable tools no doubt, but one-on-one time with experienced farmers is another valuable way to gain knowledge. A couple of my farmer friends and I learned of a group of farmers in Stanly and Anson counties of North Carolina who had been no-tilling and using cover crops for years. This pocket of farmers was within 90 minutes of us, and we decided to make a trek to see and perhaps learn from them.
We were within a few minutes of our destination when I spotted a historic marker beside the highway. I am infamous for stopping to read these signs. This historical marker’s subject was Hugh Hammond Bennett a native of Anson County and according to the historical marker regarded as the father of soil conservation. The marker made me think that this might be an omen saying we were in the right place to learn some “stuff.”
This was a very productive day of learning. We were welcomed with open arms and got confirmation that conservation tillage will work for us on our farms and that cover crops are a must to maximize the benefits of no-till. We were able view the planter setups and ask questions about them which was truly eye opening, but the number one tidbit of knowledge that was seared into my mind happened when we were scouting in one of the cotton fields.
The cotton was about waist high and the limbs growing towards the row middles were about to touch. Where the lateral limbs folded back exposing the ground, the thick cover crop residue was covering the soil like a mat. When I mentioned the thick thatch still covering the ground one of our hosts went to his truck and got a thermometer and laid it on the ground under the cotton. The day was a hot 98+ degrees and the farm was in an extremely dry condition from the lack of rain. The host picked up the thermometer that had been on the ground under the canopy of cotton and it showed 88 degrees. He then took the thermometer and we walked to a spot that had inadvertently missed the covercrop and again lay the thermometer on the bare dirt underneath the cotton. After a few minutes he retrieved the thermometer, and it registered 99 degrees. The next thing our host pointed out was how dry the soil was where no covercrop existed. We then walked back to the area where the covercrop left a thick mat of residue and folded the residue back exposing the underlying soil. The dirt was moist. Two more advantages discovered. The presence of covercrop residue can reduce the ambient temperature and the presence of the thatch inhibits evaporation.
If viewing the planter set up of our new friends on this trip was the cake, the icing was these two surprising facts. Our friends in North Carolina gave us a bunch to think about. Maybe the biggest revelation was that although our hosts participated in the NRCS cover crop programs, they both planted cover crops on all their acres, so a great number of acres were out of their pockets. We asked,” How in the world can you afford that?” They responded, “How can we afford not to?” Don’t you hate it when what you learn only creates more questions?
Mr. Bennett would be proud of his Anson County boys.
It wasn’t many years after the visit to Anson and Stanly Counties that our farm became 100% planted to cover crops. “How could I afford that?” How could I afford not to?
We had, by this time, tried several methods of planting the cover crops. We had used a grain drill, which is the best method, we had used an airplane, which is my least favorite, and finally settled on a Phillips Harrow to move a minimum amount of dirt to get the seed incorporated. We would spread the mix of covercrop seed using a pull type spin spreader or hire one of the Ag dealers to spread the seed with their commercial rigs. The latest improvement is that we have a Valmar air seeder mounted on the same tractor pulling the Phillips Harrow to have a once-over situation. It is one tractor, one operator, and one pass for getting the cover crop planted. This is a way we found to help with the time and labor issues of using cover crops.