Warm Weather Brings Out Cover Crops’ True Colors

March 6th, 2017

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Category: Grains, Miscellaneous, Oilseeds

soy-plant-356x200(Agrinews) –  Warm 70-degree weather and a lack of snow cover showed Chad Bell’s cover-cropped fields to their best advantage, even in the foggy morning that preceded a summerlike February day.

“It’s refreshing to see on days like this, this morning when it’s dreary, then there’s this bright green field. It perks you up a bit,” said Bell as he looked out over a field of growing annual ryegrass making its presence known between rows of last year’s cornstalk residue.

But for Bell, who has become a spokesman for the art and science of cover crops in the state, the real benefits of the ryegrass can’t be seen from the road.

“When I was starting out, I was more concerned about what you could see above ground. I was using the above-ground portion to measure how successful I thought the cover crop was. In reality, from the digging I’ve done with a spade, it’s much more impressive with what roots are underneath it,” he said.

The recent record-warm temperatures throughout the Midwest not only brought people out to enjoy the warmth, they also showed throughout the state the use of cover crops in farm fields.

2012 Start

Bell and his father, Greg, who raise corn and soybeans and also some hay for their cow-calf herd, started working with cover crops in 2012. Chad Bell asked a friend who worked for a county Natural Resources Conservation Service office about planting cover crops.

“His first question was — what do you want to get out of it?” Bell said.

Bell didn’t have an answer, but he spent that summer researching what he could do with cover crops that would benefit their farm. The Bells farm a variety of terrain in a county that can go from flat with a slight roll to rolling hills.

“About half our farm is similar to this and the other half is pretty rolling,” said Chad Bell, standing alongside a field along U.S. 67. south of Viola.

After drought-parched corn was harvested at the end of August 2012, Bell planted about 50 acres of a rye/radish mix and then just annual rye on another field.

After his father saw the visible results of erosion control from that first crop, he was in favor of the idea.

“He’s always been very supportive, and he was pretty much on board, especially after the first year. The couple of fields we tried it on were highly erodible, and there was noticeably less erosion after one year,” Bell said.

Bell, who worked for Goldstar FS, continues to work with the Goldstar FS facility in Woodhull for his cover crops.

For 2017, the Bells will plant soybeans into the corn field and corn into the soybean fields that are now covered in ryegrass.

The warm weather and mild winter have meant that the ryegrass hasn’t really gone dormant. Chad Bell said the mild temperatures could see a repeat of last spring, when good weather led to some fast-growing rye.

“The way the spring was turning out, the rye was two feet tall in the middle of April,” he said.

Instead of taking the chance to spray it too early and risk the dead crop shading the soil, they let the crop grow and planted into it.

 

 

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