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southern MN | I'm a proponent of cover crops, tho very hard in my climate, only works with a pea or the rare small gran farmer around here. I grow what I can with the few acres of oats I put in.p, its a small deal. We harvest beans and corn after first frost, and are often planting corn into ground that still has reminents of frost in the ground and no weeds coming up yet, so there just isn't a season for the cover crops to grow.
I still like them and follow the discussions and do my little bit on any oats ground or if their is tilling wasteland or so....
It is just, in the big picture, we take a crop of grain off the land and haul it away.
Somehow, those nutrients nutrients need to come back?
N can be created, manufactured on site.
But we are getting to stripping fertility at 1/2 to 2/3 of the recommended rate.
And doing cover crops to pull up nutrients from deeper in the soil.
Clearly that works -this- year, as your data shows.
But are we doing our soils good with such practices, or will we find, in 10 years, that our soil is poorer in some ways from these practices of short-changing P and K applications?
My ground is very run down in P and K, from dads methods. Trying to deal with that now. Tho, I have very deep and clay and high organic soils that allow a lot of forgiveness along the way.
Again, I am not being critical of cover crops, just trying to look at the long term effects? Certainly a cover crop can concentrate available nutrients and produce a better crop this year. Can that work endlessly, or is some mining going on tho, over 5, 10, 20 years? Is the cover crop creating something, or just borrowing from future years?
Paul | |
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Cover crops to increase P & K
