Companion crops can provide revenue for producers while they establish short-lived perennial forages, but only if there is adequate moisture.
Paul Jefferson of the federal Semiarid Agricultural Research Centre in Swift Current, Sask., found this during a three-year trial of the practice.
“Producers have told me they don’t want to wait two years to establish Russian wild rye,” said Jefferson. “They don’t want crested wheatgrass because hay buyers want other species. They didn’t want something they could seed down for 15 years. We went to work on that, then came companion crops.”
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The researcher said he wanted to check if companion cropping of annuals such as peas and canola could be done successfully while establishing grasses such as Dahurian wild rye, intermediate wheatgrass or slender wheatgrass (combined with alfalfa).
“It is all dependent on the amount of moisture available to grow the crop. In the brown soil zone, we found it’s just not a good idea,” he said.
“Even if you cut your (seeding) rates, the annual crops are highly competitive and injure the seedlings unless there is surplus moisture.”
Studies done by Agriculture Canada and the University of Saskatchewan in the 1960s and 1970s showed that in the brown soil zone, cereal companion crops injured long-lived forages in the establishment years.
“Now when we try with peas and canola and short-rotation forages we are finding the same results. It is all about moisture. It will work in Nipawin (in northern Saskatchewan) but not in Swift Current.”
In all three years that Jefferson and his colleagues compared the practice, 1998, 1999 and 2000, they found the same results – it just doesn’t work in dry areas.
“Of all the calls I get from farmers who have had failures to get their forages to get a catch, 50 percent are related to an attempt to use a companion crop in a dry year anywhere or in the traditionally dry areas.”
Jefferson said shaving the seeding rates on the companion crop has been tried and the result is usually “a disaster with a bunch of weedy patches, spotty patches or nothing that survives the winter.”
Newer short-lived varieties of forages have faster growth rates than their long-duration cousins, but they are still no competition for a fast growing annual.
“We did find that the biggest yields came from the fields where there were no companion crops used.”
Growers in the black soil zone have a one in three chance of having a slightly reduced forage yield in their second and third years if there was a companion crop in the establishment year, he said.
The highest yielding short-lived forage was the intermediate wheatgrass, followed by Dahurian wild rye and then slender wheatgrass.
“If I had to pick a variety to use as a short-rotation forage, I would have to say the Dahurian wild rye was the best. It only lives for a couple of years and yields well in the meantime. It is easy to kill and because you only want it for a short time, it is the lowest cost to manage when you return to grain production,” he said.
In the test plots “it took two good shots of Roundup to kill the intermediate wheatgrass, so I preferred the wild rye.”
The Dahurian wild rye yielded an average of two tonnes per acre.
In the first year of new trials, with a very late-seeded barley crop in 2002, the barley yield was 32 bushels per acre where Dahurian wild rye had been planted with a companion in 1998.
“They were significantly better than the intermediate wheat grass plots and similar to the slender wheatgrass,” he said.
“It has tremendous growth rates and is far too aggressive for anywhere drought stress would be an issue.”
