Cover Crops: Beneficial For Field Cultivation, Expensive For Farmers’ Pockets
It’s a widely known fact that winter crops constitute an essential component of soil cover, nutrient cycling and organic matter content. Paradoxically, even though the advantages of cover crops are well documented, they are rarely used by farmers in field cultivation. More thorough research has shown that main obstacles that prevent farmers from using the above mentioned technique are time and money. This is why introducing some cost-efficient crop cover system seems necessary for the increase of the use of winter cover crops.
A scientific research has been conducted on the potential use of self-seeding winter cereal cover crops and then the results were published in this year’s summer issue of the Agronomy Journal. During the research, the scientists measured the amount of green groundcover self-seeded winter cover crops produced after soybean harvests in the fall of 2007 and the following year. The study proved that the cover crops’ growth was the most satisfactory when a wheat cover crop and mechanical seed dispersal were used before the soybean harvest.
Jeremy Singer, a researcher from USDA Agricultural Research Service, sees the importance of this research in extending the ecological functions that cover crops perform beyond their normal termination dates. Not to mention the other potential benefits that result from that discovery, such as lowering the costs and risk of establishing cover crops in the years to come.
It looks like the organic crop producers are going to take advantage in self-seeding cover crops because of their natural potential to suppress weed without disturbing the soil. Cover crops are also responsible for the increased nutrient retention as well as soil erosion reduction, which improves water quality. Moreover, the seeders can help farmers optimize time and save money by compressing a number of tasks in one pass through a field that hasn’t been tilled yet. The seeder seeds cover crops, adds fertilizer and sprays the herbicide over the weeds to suppress their growth and, eventually, get rid of them. The tractor pulls the seeder through the cornfield rows and uses a sensor to guide the device, which has several blades that lightly till the ground just in between the cornrows to create a planting swath. Then, the seeds drop onto the soil and are packed into the place by the follow-up roller.