By Anna Cates and Liz Stahl et.al
We’re nearing the end of a pretty solid growing season for corn and soybeans, and it will soon be time for harvest and other fall activities – like planting cover crops! Given the huge soil losses we saw with wind erosion across Minnesota last winter, this is a great year to start thinking about how to protect your soil from wind and water losses. Cover crops can also help manage water by building soil structure, which you need to both store and infiltrate water…because you never know when the next drought, wind storm, or 8 inches of rain will come along.
Over the 2024-25 winter, we tested a few different combinations of cover crop species and seeding rates, and learned a few things worth sharing.
Oats
In one trial, we looked at oats at seeding rates from 10 to 60 lbs/ac, mixed with radish at 1 to 6 lb/ac. At our St. Paul research site, we found that these treatments all produced more than 850 lbs/ac of biomass, and, in Waseca, from 2,200 to 3,000 lb/ac of biomass. In Lamberton, biomass produced by the oat/radish mix ranged from 425 to 540 lb/ac, which still provided a respectable amount of ground cover over the winter. We did prioritize planting these before mid-September, and used a drill to get good establishment in a dry fall, but these results reinforce our perception of oats as a go-to quick-growing grass to build your mix around if you want something that winter-kills. (And as recently noted, it’s not a host for many small grain pests.)