Tag Archive for: Cover Crops

USDA Publishes New Resource to Help Farmers Adapt to Climate Change

Farming is an inherently risky business. On top of daily weather events, market fluctuations, land access, taxes, and expenses, the stress of climate change exacerbates these problems and serves to make agriculture even less predictable. Farmers and ranchers all over the United States are already experiencing the effects of climate change and severe weather events, and this variability is only expected to increase in the years ahead.

So this begs the question– what can farmers do to maintain their livelihoods and America’s food supply in the face of a rapidly changing climate?

In response to these pressing concerns, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently released a new report to provide farmers with preparation strategies, coping mechanisms, and recovery actions to acclimate to climate change impacts. It will ultimately serve as a key resource for educators and advisors as well as farmers and ranchers. The report, titled Adaptation Resources for Agriculture: Responding to Climate Variability and Change in the Midwest and Northeast, was published by USDA’s Climate Hubs for the Midwest, Northeast, and Northern Forests.

In 2014, USDA created the National Climate Hubs program to collect data, scientific studies, and climate projections to gauge the effects of climate change on the environment. USDA maintains seven hubs–Pacific Northwest, Southwest, Northern Plains, Southern Plains, Midwest, Southeast, and Northeast–and three sub-hubs–Caribbean, Northern Forests, and California. According to USDA, “the hubs are intended to help maintain and strengthen agricultural production, natural resource management, and rural economic development under increasing climate variability by providing guidance on technologies and risk management practices at regional and local scales.”

For this report, the regional climate hubs assembled authors from different USDA programs, including theAgricultural Research Service (ARS),  the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and the Forest Service, in addition to conservationists and climate scientists.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) and our members believe that by giving farmers the tools they need to invest in their soil and actively adapt to and mitigate climate change, we can develop effective strategies that work for farmers, the environment, and the economy. The report published this week provides an important overview of key adaptation and mitigation strategies to achieve that goal, and below we highlight key findings from the report.

Climate Change is Already Affecting Northeastern and Midwestern Farmers

All across the country, climate change means warmer temperatures for longer periods of time, in addition to more frequent and stronger weather events. As the report points out, the Northeast and the Midwest are experiencing more rainfall than ever before­, with the Northeast’s precipitation having increased by 70 percent since the mid 20th century.

The report digs into the climate change-fueled problems farmers are already facing. Extreme weather events, heightened precipitation levels, flooding, and warmer temperatures all have the potential to directly damage crops, soil health, and critical farm infrastructure. Warmer temperatures and resulting droughts can degrade soil moisture content, and ultimately lead to lower yields and poor quality outputs.

The report also highlights the impacts of increased pests pressures and diseases. Changing climate patterns allow invasive species to grow and outcompete fields of crops. And with milder and shortened winters, both destructive insects and pathogens are set to become stronger and to cover a larger ground, impacting crop and livestock production across the country.

As we have previously reported, the impacts of climate change will cost taxpayers billions of dollars, but our nation’s farmers and ranchers have an enormous opportunity to mitigate these effects through conservation practices that sequester carbon, improve soil health, and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. At the same time, farmers will have to rapidly respond to the increased pressures from a changing climate, and the report highlights the key linkage between these two strategies.

The Linkage Between Adaptation and Mitigation

The report points out that climate change adaptation ­– a form of increasing resilience by reducing the impacts of these weather events– and greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation – an action that actively seeks to reduce noxious carbon and other GHG emissions to reduce harm to the environment – are separate concepts. However, the actions needed to address these two goals can often be one and the same. For example, using cover crops helps retain soil moisture content and prevent erosion (an adaptation strategy) while also increasing the soil’s carbon sequestration (a mitigation strategy).

Adaptation can require immediate responses, based up on daily weather events, in addition to planning months or years ahead to prepare for ever-evolving patterns and obstacles. Both are equally important to consider and can often work in tandem such that “short-term initiatives can inform longer term strategy through a ‘learn by doing’ approach,” as noted in the report.

When presented with constant fluctuations both daily and annually, it is evident that farmers will not be able to continue their practices under the status quo. The report presents two adaptation options: maintain but adjust current practices or change over more completely to a sustainable agriculture approach.

KEEP READING ON NATIONAL SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE COALITION

Cover Crop Mixtures Increase Agroecosystem Services, First-of-Kind Study Suggests

 

Author: Jeff Mulhollem | Published on: September 8, 2016

Planting a multi-species mixture of cover crops — rather than a cover crop monoculture — between cash crops, provides increased agroecosystem services, or multifunctionality, according to researchers in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.

That was the conclusion drawn from a two-year study of 18 cover-crop treatments, ranging in diversity from one to eight plant species. Cover crops were grown at the Penn State Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center preceding a corn crop. The researchers measured five benefits provided by cover crops — ecosystem services — in each cover crop system to assess the relationship between species.

Those services included weed suppression and nitrogen retention during the cover-crop season, cover-crop aboveground biomass, inorganic nitrogen supply during the subsequent cash-crop season and subsequent corn yield.

The study was the first field-based test of the relationship between cover-crop species and multifunctionality — the quality of cover crops to simultaneously provide multiple benefits — noted research team member Jason Kaye, professor of soil biogeochemistry. Never before had this relationship been examined and analyzed in a crop rotation.

As continued research yields more precise information about optimal cover-crop seed mixtures and planting rates, Kaye predicted, farmers will deploy this strategy to enhance soil quality, control weed growth, manage critical nutrients such as nitrogen, improve crop yields and reduce nutrient runoff.

“This kind of ecological study identifying a positive relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services suggests that higher plant diversity will increase services from agroecosystems, and that has immediate implications for management practices and policies for sustainable agriculture, including Chesapeake Bay water quality,” Kaye said. “In a corn production system, simply increasing cover-crop species richness will have a small impact on agroecosystem services, but designing mixtures that maximize functional diversity may lead to agroecosystems with greater multifunctionality.”

KEEP READING ON SCIENCE DAILY

Land Stewardship Project: Goals, Realities & Soil Health

Author: Brian DeVore | Published: August 8, 2016

It’s been said that soil without biology is just geology—an accumulation of lifeless minerals unable to spawn healthy plant growth. And as intense monocropping production practices increasingly remove more life from the ground than they return, it sends that soil closer to fossilization via what conservationist Barry Fisher calls, “the spiral of degradation”: eroded, compacted and, eventually, dead.

But if a pair of Land Stewardship Project meetings held in southeastern Minnesota recently are any indication, a number of farmers don’t see such a downward plunge as written in stone. Fisher and other soil health experts at these meetings strongly encouraged the standing-room only crowds to return as much biology as possible to the ground beneath our feet. And in most cases, that means making it so living roots are present 365-days-a-year.

“So when in doubt, you plant,” said Fisher, who heads up the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Soil Health Division for the central part of the U.S. Until recently, he headed up a soil health partnershipin Indiana that has made that state the leader in cover crop establishment.

Indeed, through presentations, panel discussions and networking, farmers participating in the southeastern Minnesota meetings focused on a key soil health improvement strategy that is based on Fisher’s advice: cover crops. During the past five years, there’s been a lot of excitement generated around the growing of these non-cash crops on corn and soybean fields before and after the regular growing season. These crops, which are often small grains such as cereal rye or brassicas such as tillage radish, have proven to be very effective at not only building soil health, but also keeping it from washing and blowing away in the first place. In fact, erosion control is the number one reason farmers begin experimenting with cover crops, according to Sarah Carlson, Midwest Cover Crops Coordinator for Practical Farmers of Iowa.

KEEP READING ON LAND STEWARDSHIP PROJECT

Cover Crops Build Soil

Author: Raylene Nickel 

Cow-calf producer and no-till farmer Lance Gartner, Glen Ullin, North Dakota, grows full-season cover crops to build soil health and to provide early-winter grazing for cows.

Soil organic matter has increased as a result of the multispecies cover crops and the fertility contributed by cattle manure and urine. “Before I started growing cover crops seven years ago, soil tests showed my no-till soils had 2.3% to 2.9% organic matter,” says Gartner. “In recent years, my soils have tested 3.7% to 4.25% organic matter.”

The building of soil organic matter results in a reduced need for applying nitrogen (N) to wheat and corn. Gartner has reduced commercial N use for these crops by 60%, and sometimes he eliminates fertilizer applications altogether.

The yardstick guiding Gartner’s N-application rate is his estimate of N mineralizing from the organic matter. “The unavailable nitrogen doesn’t show up on soil tests, and what mineralizes is not immediately available to plants,” he says. “It becomes available to the crop slowly throughout the growing season.

“I allocate about 1,000 pounds per acre of unavailable N for each percent of organic matter,” he says. “I then figure 1% of this 1,000 pounds of unavailable N will mineralize. This yields 10 pounds of available N. When multiplied times 4% of organic matter, the result is a nitrogen credit of 40 pounds of available N per acre.”

KEEP READING ON SUCCESSFUL FARMING

What kind of chicken and eggs do you recommend?

Author: Amanda Blakenship

There is a belief among many people that we need conventional agriculture to feed the planet. I disagree completely. Corporate seed and chemical companies want us to believe in conventional agriculture so they can continue to profit off of hard working farmers. These unsustainable practices are harming people and the planet. My husband and I decided to put our background to good use by showing everyone that we can produce healthy foods using safe and sustainable agricultural practices. We are safely producing grains, hays, beef, chicken, turkey, duck, eggs, and lamb. We are benefiting the soils, animals, people and planet with our hands on management. By growing, harvesting, and milling our own feed we will be able to keep raising pastured soy and corn free poultry. In coming years we plan to add on-farm hatching and processing to further our independence. With customer support we will continue to expand our impact and help change the food system.

Utilizing holistic management and regenerative agriculture, our goal is to constantly improve the health of the soils as well as the diversity and abundance of life within those soils. The health of our soils, pastures, animals, and people are all interdependent. Our practices use far less fossil fuel than traditional agriculture and still produce at least an equal amount of food. Our regenerative agriculture practices include the use of no-till seeding, cover cropping, holistic planned multi-species animal grazing, pasture cropping, and composting. Our beloved animals help us sequester carbon and naturally fertilize our soils. Our soils also benefit from a healthy population of worms, bugs, fungi and other microorganisms that drive carbon sequestration. We never use any vaccines or antibiotics.

 KEEP READING ON NOURISHING OUR CHILDREN BLOG

Cover Crops, a Farming Revolution With Deep Roots in the Past

Author: Stephanie Storm

When Mark Anson came home with his hair on fire after a seminar on the seemingly soporific topic of soil health, his younger brother, Doug, was skeptical.

What had Mark lit up was cover crops: fields of noncash crops like hairy vetch and cereal rye that act on soil like a nourishing facial after the harvest.

Mark, 60, and his two brothers, together with assorted sons and sons-in-law, run Anson Farms, a big commercial soybean and corn operation in Indiana and Illinois. Concern about the soil quality of the family’s fields had nagged at him for some time. “Our corn was wilting when temperatures hit 103 degrees,” he said, and such heat isn’t so unusual in the summer. “I felt like I had a gorilla on my shoulder.” What he learned about the benefits of cover crops gave him hope.

But to Doug, planting some noncommercial crops seemed an antiquated practice, like using a horse-drawn plow. Cover crops had long been replaced by fertilizers. Still, he shared his brother’s concern about their soil. Its texture was different, not as loamy as it had once been, and a lot of it was running off into ditches and other waterways when it rained.

So in 2010 the family decided to humor Mark by sowing some 1,200 acres, which Mark describes as highly eroded farmland, with wheat cleanings and cereal rye. Additionally, they spread some cover crops to eroded areas in a few fields.

KEEP READING IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Cover Crops, a Farming Revolution With Deep Roots in the Past

Author: Stephanie Storm

When Mark Anson came home with his hair on fire after a seminar on the seemingly soporific topic of soil health, his younger brother, Doug, was skeptical.

What had Mark lit up was cover crops: fields of noncash crops like hairy vetch and cereal rye that act on soil like a nourishing facial after the harvest.

Mark, 60, and his two brothers, together with assorted sons and sons-in-law, run Anson Farms, a big commercial soybean and corn operation in Indiana and Illinois. Concern about the soil quality of the family’s fields had nagged at him for some time. “Our corn was wilting when temperatures hit 103 degrees,” he said, and such heat isn’t so unusual in the summer. “I felt like I had a gorilla on my shoulder.” What he learned about the benefits of cover crops gave him hope.

But to Doug, planting some noncommercial crops seemed an antiquated practice, like using a horse-drawn plow. Cover crops had long been replaced by fertilizers. Still, he shared his brother’s concern about their soil. Its texture was different, not as loamy as it had once been, and a lot of it was running off into ditches and other waterways when it rained.

Keep Reading in The New York Times

Cover Crops: Long-term Benefit

Author: Reed Fujii

LOCKEFORD — Farmers and ranchers primarily focus on growing plants that produce food or fiber — something of value they can sell and get cash to pay their bills for seed, farm labor, fuel and fertilizer and, hopefully, keep something for themselves.

But researchers at the Lockeford Plant Materials Center are encouraging growers to think differently — to cultivate cover crops, noncommercial plants that can improve the soil and more.

“They have so many benefits,” said Margaret Smither-Kopperl, manager of the U.S. Department of Agriculture research facility. “What we’re trying to do here is useful for all of us.”

Cover crops can help break up soil, improving water infiltration. and add organic material, which boosts the soil’s ability to retain water. They also can inhibit weed growth, provide nutrients for commercial crops and sustain beneficial insects.

During a field day attended by about two dozen farmers at the center last week, Smither-Kopperl acknowledged that water use by cover crops is a concern, especially with California entering a fourth year of drought.

But by helping soil retain moisture, she said, “They can actually store water in the soil.”

Cover crops are no panacea, the experts said. Plants or seed mixtures commonly used in other parts of the country may falter or fail in California’s Mediterranean climate, with its variable amounts of winter-months rain.

Keep Reading on Recordnet.com

Improving Soil Health May Require More Use of Cover Crops

Author: Julie Buntjer

WORTHINGTON — Farming practices haven’t been kind to the agricultural landscape since farmers first began tilling up the prairie soils of southwest Minnesota more than a century ago.

The common two-crop rotation of corn and soybeans has contributed little organic matter to the soil and even less cover to protect the landscape from the winds that often blow across the region.

Jay Fuhrer, dubbed the Waterway King of North Dakota (he’s a Natural Resources Conservation Service conservationist in Bismarck, N.D.), was in Worthington on Thursday to address soil health and the advantages of beneficial crop rotations, cover crops and livestock grazing on farm fields.

Before a crowd of more than 70 attendees at Minnesota West Community and Technical College, Fuhrer shared how he spent the first half of his career building drainage ditches and designing waterways because North Dakota farmers couldn’t get water into the soil profile. Every time it rained, the water flowed across the landscape. That, combined with wind erosion, meant a lot of nutrient loss on farm fields.

By the 1990s, Fuhrer said a team of conservationists came together as a team and decided their approach had to change.

“We can’t keep going the way we are — it’s non-sustaining,” he said, adding that with the focus placed on conserving a degrading resource base, the team developed ideas to rebuild soil and recreate the pore spaces that once existed.

Keep Reading in Daily Globe

Grazing Cover Crops and Benefits for Livestock Operations – Gabe Brown

A presentation by North Dakota farmer Gabe Brown at the National Conference on Cover Crops and Soil Health.

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