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Helping People Help The Land
What is the Logan County Soil Conservation District? The District has been serving the citizens of Logan County for over 50 years. We are the only local agency whose primary mission is to protect our natural resources. We actively work in cooperation with other agencies to improve water quality, conserve and improve soil, conserve energy and improve the environment for the people of Logan County and - more importantly—for our future generations. Our employees are supervised by a locally elected board that serves as a liaison to state and federal agencies. The District IS your local voice for conservation at the state and national levels!
What does the District do for me? The District is an important asset to the County because it provides many valuable services: ¨ Trees: The most visible function of the District is to protect our County’s landscape by assisting with the purchasing of and planting trees to protect roads, cropland, farmsteads, water bodies, and some urban areas. The District offers this unique service at a low cost. They help find cost-share dollars so that anybody who wants trees can get them, irregardless of their financial situation. ¨ Education: Every year the 8th Graders in Logan & McIntosh Counties attend an Eco Education Tour. The kids love the hands-on tours where they learn intensively about soils, water quality, wildlife, plants, and other natural resource science. The District also sponsors Stewardship Week for Logan County churches and the Keep ND Clean Poster Contest. ¨ Soil Conservation, Water Quality, Wildlife Habitat Improvement Practices. The District is actively involved in the design and application of conservation practices that improve cropland, grazingland, forestland, and wildlife land in Logan County.
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Cover Crops
Cover crops are a useful tool to improve soil health and increase a cropping system’s diversity. Cover crops also benefit the cropland ecosystem by breaking up disease cycles, increasing soil nutrients, and providing fall grazing or additional forage. Under conventional cropping systems the crop is harvested in late summer leaving the soil “idle” until the next spring. By seeding a cover crop on an early harvested field or on a field taken for forage, soil microbes remain active and cycle additional nutrients for the next year’s crop. Roots from cover crops remain intact providing channels for gas exchange, and water infiltration, and also help in breaking up compacted layers within the soil profile. Cover crops also help in controlling late summer weed growth by creating a canopy over the soil surface. Cover crops are very useful for tying up nutrients that would otherwise leach below the rooting zone for the next year’s crop. Cover crops can be hayed, grazed, chemically burned down, or simply left to winter kill. Cover crop cocktails or mixtures have been proven to be more effective in establishing and providing the desired results. Cover crop mixtures can be designed to meet each individual producer’s needs. Oil-seed radishes and turnips are a popular cover crop as their taproots punch holes in compacted soil, improving water infiltration. Other cover crops that can be seeded include millet, sorghum, soybeans, oats, cowpea, sunflower, red, white, crimson and sweet clover, hairy vetch, rye, and winter wheat. Cover crops reduce erosion, increase soil organic matter, manage excess nutrients, nitrogen fixation, weed and disease suppression, provide extra forage, manage soil moisture and improve infiltration. What cover crops are there? Cover crop can consist of legumes to fix nitrogen (soybean, clovers, vetch, cowpea, lupin) cool season grasses (barley, oats, winter triticale, winter wheat, winter rye, annual rye grass) warm season grasses (sudangrass, millets) and tap root crops (turnips, sunflower, radish, canola). You are asking yourself why would I do this, I am saving water for my next years crop. As far as conserving moisture we invite all of you to come in and get a free soil survey book for Logan County. In this book there is a section on physical properties of the soil. This will tell you the available water capacity of each type of soil on your land. Your soil can hold so much water before it runs off or moves further down the profile and crop roots can not reach it to use it. Cover crops are a good way to use up this excess water. Logan County average rainfall is between 15 to 20 inches per year. If your soil has the water capacity to hold 5 inches, use the rest to grow something. Producers that grow oats for hay, for example, are baling it in July, you have at least 52 days left in the growing season to produce cover crop. This cover crop could be hayed, grazed or chemically burned down (green manure). If you are interested, the Logan County Soil Conservation District has an innovative grant that you could apply for and receive $500 towards seed cost of a cover crop cocktail.
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