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Chesley, Ontario | I'll agree with you, Jay, on the amount of nutrient removed by alfalfa, and to some extent that alfalfa is over-rated as a soil builder. An alfalfa-grass mixture would be far more beneficial for increasing soil organic matter. However, as plowboy noted, reducing tillage is the best way to keep organic matter, and three years of alfalfa means three years without any tillage...which we can't do with corn.
As far as the corn root mass, in Ontario trials it has not hung around as long as other types of residue so it doesn't contribute as much to the soil organic matter pool as we would expect. It MIGHT be a sustainable system to combine the corn, and then harvest some of the residue after grain harvest, since we won't be able to get more than about half of the residue in this system anyway. This is far different than chopping whole plant corn to make ethanol and leaving the surface of the soil bare.
If we are thinking of biomass crops, I think we need to include cover crops in our budgets. Otherwise, we will be going back to the situation at the start of the last century, where it could often be said that "He had worn out two farms already, and was still young enough to wear out a third." | |
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Broin to convert Iowa plant to Biomass
