If Ken Miller had any doubts about the value of cover crops, they were erased last summer.
Miller, who farms near Bismarck, North Dakota, planted barley on two fields in April. One was a conventional field fertilized with urea and the second had no fertilizer. But it was planted on a field with a cover crop in 2007, a cocktail of plants including turnip, radish, sunflower, cowpea, sweet clover and millet.
When he harvested both in late July, the field with urea yielded 65 bushels per acre while the cover crop field with no fertilizer produced 85 bu. per acre.
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“I saw the crop response, so something is happening,” said Miller, who shared his experience with cover crops Feb. 19 at the Manitoba-North Dakota Zero Tillage Farmers Association annual workshop in Brandon.
Miller and others in the Burleigh County Soil Conservation District started experimenting with cover crops in 2006, after attending a no-till conference in Salinas, Kansas. They heard a speaker from South America who talked about cover crops using a mixture of radish, turnip and other plants.
“We brought some of that information back and tried it,” said Miller.
He said many farmers in his area initially scoffed at the concept of growing a mixture of radishes, sunflowers and other plants to reduce erosion and boost organic content in the soil. A few years later, the idea is no longer crazy.
“We had a no-till conference in January and we had over 500 people, which is phenomenal for a district workshop …. Other counties are trying it. It’s really caught on,” he said.
Kris Nichols, a soil microbiologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Mandan, N.D., said the perception that it’s too dry on the northern plains for such crop is a mistaken philosophy.
She noted research has shown that with a one percent gain in soil organic carbon, an additional 14 litres of water can be stored per sq. metre of soil.
“The question I ask is how can you not grow cover crops when you have a drought?” said Nichols, who talked about the importance of building soil biota at the Brandon workshop.
What Miller has learned after three years of cover crop experimentation is that nature knows best.
“Try and imitate the native prairies. It had very high organic matter and very diverse (plant) communities. We basically destroyed it by tilling, tilling, tilling …. So we changed the soil biology and now we have to restore it,” Miller said in an interview after his presentation.
Andrew Kopeechuk, the livestock and forage co-ordinator with the Manitoba Zero Tillage Research Association, was in the audience. He had seen Miller speak before and said the cover crop message is slowly getting out in Manitoba.
“It is getting more and more popular. Some of the big seed companies are starting to carry some of these specialty seeds, like the turnip and the radish and the kale,” he said.
“It’s something I definitely want to get into.”
