Using Cover Crops to Make the Best of Un-Seeded Acres

 

The 2011 planting season will become the new bookmark for comparing backward spring conditions, but no one wants to be reminded of this every day when travelling past unplanted fields, Consider planting cover crops in those fields. This can provide a number of benefits, including soil structure building and help to improve internal drainage. Managed properly, cover crops can help prepare a field for timely wheat planting this fall.

Cover crops serve many different functions, as shown in table 1, from helping with weed control to building soil to scavenging nitrogen from manure or nitrogen applications. Some cover crops can be harvested as feed for livestock while other cover crops can be harvested for seed production. There are many cover crops to choose from: legumes, brassicas, broadleaves and grasses and within each of these categories are several different species.

Table 1: Matching Cover Crop Choices to Function

Cover crop function	Best choices for cover crops
Nitrogen production	Legumes - Red clover, peas, vetch
Nitrogen scavenging	Summer/Fall uptake - Oilseed radish and other brassicas, oats Winter/spring uptake - rye, winter wheat
Weed suppression	Fast growing/shading plants like - oilseed radish and other brassicas, winter rye, buckwheat
Soil structure building	Grasses like oats, barley, rye, wheat, triticale, ryegrass, or fibrous root systems such as red clover
Compaction reduction	Strong tap roots that grow over time - Alfalfa, sweet clover
Biomass return to soil	Fall seeded - oats, oilseed radish Summer seeded- millets, sorghum, sudangrass, sorghum sudan
Erosion protection (wind, water)	Winter rye, winter wheat, ryegrass (well established), spring cereals seeded early
Emergency Forage	Fall - Oats, barley, wheat, rye, forage brassicas Summer - millets, sorghum, sudangrass, sorghum sudan
Nematode suppression	Cover crop activity is variety and nematode specific. Cutlass Mustard, Sudans/Sorghums (Sordan 79, Trudan 8), Pearl Millet (CFPM 101), Oilseed radish (Adagio, Colonel)

http://www.mccc.msu.edu/documents/managingccprof/ManagingCoverCropsProfitably_buckwheat.pdf

http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/cover_crops01/buckwheat.htm

 

Buckwheat as a Cover Crop

An example of a cover crop that may be of interest to some is Buckwheat.

Buckwheat is a short-season cover crop that reaches maturity in about 80 days. In organic production buckwheat helps to:

• suppress weeds,
• attract beneficial insects such as bees,
• extract soil phosphorus that can be utilized by the following crop, and
• loosen compacted topsoil

Buckwheat will produce seed in as little as 6-8 weeks. Buckwheat does not thrive well under hot-dry conditions

Figure 1. Cover crops like buckwheat offer additional benefits such as providing
food and habitat to pollinators like bees.