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Logan County |
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Producer Resources |
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A Guide to Planting Native Plantscaping |
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Cover Crop Species Index |
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The No-Till Resource section of this website is designed to be your one-stop web portal to No-Till Farming information. |
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No-Till Farmer is committed to providing the very latest in no-tilling ideas, inventions, techniques, and news to enhance your no-till knowledge and add bushels of dollars to your operation. |
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Web Soil Survey (WSS) provides soil data and information produced by the National Cooperative Soil Survey. |
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Living Landscapes In North Dakota |
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No-Till Farmer |
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No-Till On the Plains |
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Michigan Cover Crop Research |
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Web Soil Survey |
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To contact us: |
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This website provides windows to new and specialty crop profiles. |
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Center For New Crops & Plant Products |
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The Research Farm’s primary goal is to identify, research, and demonstrate methods of strengthening and stabilizing the agriculture economy. |
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Dakota Lakes Research Farm |
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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). |
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“Managing Cover Crops Profitably” explores how and why cover crops work and provides all the information needed to build cover crops into any farming operation. |
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Managing Cover Crops Profitably |
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Cover crops could be considered the backbone of any annual cropping system that seeks to be sustainable. In this publication they summarize the principal uses and benefits of cover crops and green manures. |
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Overview of Cover Crops and Green Manures |
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They help you incorporate Organic, Soil Foodweb and Environmental practices to create healthy, productive and efficient agriculture to produce higher yields and better nutritional quality in the crops produced. |
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Oregon’s Soil Foodweb |
