Finding the right crop rotation can be a key to successful no-till farming, and Dr. Jason Warren, assistant professor and soil and water conservation/management extension specialist at OSU, says cover crops are finding their way more and more into those rotations.
For a continuous wheat producer, Warren suggests planting a cover crop to graze.
“I’m not a big fan of planting sorghum sudan if I’m going to just plant wheat back into the standing material, but if I want to run cattle on it, I’m going to have sorghum sudan out there because that’s a high forage-producing grass,” he says. “But if I just want to grow nitrogen, then I’m going to grow cowpeas.
“And if I want a little bit of both, then I’ll plant them both together.”
Warren says farmers need to know that planting a minor broadleaf species with a grass, such as cowpeas and sorghum sudan, will reduce the tonnage of material produced because the tonnage comes from the grass.
“If we want a big tonnage - sorghum sudan or something like pearl millet that’s going to grow a lot of biomass,” he says. “If you want smaller tonnage to just cover the ground, then you could go with like a German millet.”
Warren says planting a summer cover crop can also have a positive effect on soil health.
“I grew up flipping dirt in western Oklahoma, and I look around at all these soils where we’re flipping dirt, and they’ve been severely damaged. I mean we’ve plowed two feet into the soil in some cases from erosion,” he says. “Where we’re no-tilling it, we’re seeing tremendous improvements in the organic matter and biological activity, and therefore, the productivity of those soils.