Tag Archive for: Cover Crops

How a Grain and Legume Farmer Harvests Nutrition from the Soil

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Larry Kandarian grows legumes alongside ancient grains on his California farm, producing a polyculture that benefits both the health of the land and his own.

Author: Clarissa Wei | Published: January 9, 2018

“I’m 72, but I consider myself middle-aged,” said Larry Kandarian of Kandarian Organic Farms as he smiled and took a sip of his stew. Sitting in his trailer with a sun-weathered tan, Kandarian looks like any other farmer in the state.

And for a while, he was.

In the 1970s, Kandarian started off as a conventional farmer specializing in flowers and California native plants on his farm in Los Osos, about 100 miles northwest of Santa Barbara on California’s central coast. He decided to pivot full-time to growing organic, ancient grains eight years ago after the recession shrank the market for his goods.

“I figured that people still have to eat grains,” he said of the shift.

But what sets him apart now is his approach to growing food. Instead of deeply plowing the land and mixing in sheets of fertilizers to ensure high yields like most farmers in America, Kandarian employs a minimal-tillage system and uses absolutely no fertilizers or compost.

For fertility, Kandarian takes advantage of the nitrogen-fixing properties of plants in the legume family like clover, beans, and sweet pea. He sows legume seeds in the ground after the grain is harvested, leaving the chaff of the grains still on the field. The chaff decomposes and fertilizes the legume crop. The legume crop, as it grows, fixes nitrogen into the soil.

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ND Farmer Stresses Importance of Regenerative Agriculture

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Author: Elizabeth Varin | Published: December 20, 2017

Gabe Brown hasn’t tilled his land near Bismarck, N.D., since 1994.

He hasn’t used synthetic fertilizer since 2007.

Yet he said he’s still seeing yields measuring above Burleigh County averages and he’s still turning a profit profit.

“We’re our worst enemy, not allowing nature to function,” he said last week at the South Dakota Grassland Coalition 2017 Winter Road Show’s stop at the Dakota Event Center.

“…We cannot have ecological integrity without human integrity,” he said. “All of us need to look in the mirror and realize that our management decisions that we make every day on our operation affect thousands of people, really hundreds of thousands of people. Because they’re affecting the mineral cycle, the water cycle, the nutrient cycle.”

Brown argued in favor of looking beyond cash crops and into the ecosystem of the land farmers are using.

“It’s not that I’ve got more nutrients,” he said, comparing his land to tilled land, land with minimal crop diversity and land on which lots of synthetic fertilizer is used. “They have that much in their soils also. It’s just that it’s not available. Because they don’t have the biology and the healthy ecosystem to make those nutrients available.”

Brown spoke about regenerative agriculture, a land management approach that aims to improve soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density.

“You’ve got to think outside the box to make profit in commodity markets,” he said.

The crowd included a mix of farmers and conservationists, said Valeree DeVine, Natural Resources Conservation Service district conservationist.

“What we like to see is that they come and hear a message from another farmer and rancher,” she said. “As an agency we can talk it but we can’t show them what we’ve done on our own operation. So we feel that it means more from another farmer and rancher.”

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Healthy Soils Program: Diversity of Farms Awarded, Cover Crops and Compost Most Popular Practices

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Author: Brian Shobe | Published: December 13, 2017

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) announced its first round of grants for the Healthy Soils Program last week. In our first blogpost about the awards, we shared a summary of the awards by project type (incentives versus demonstration) and a breakdown of the awards by county. In this blogpost, we share a preliminary analysis of the distribution of the awards based on land use type and the practices projects plan to adopt.

This preliminary analysis is based on our interpretations[i] of the one-paragraph project descriptions provided by applicants, which you can read here:

Incentives Projects

The 64 incentives projects are fairly well distributed across the major agricultural land use categories in California, with a quarter of the awards going to orchards, a quarter to annual cropland, and 13-14% each to vineyards, grazing/range lands, and mixed land use operations. Nine percent of project descriptions were too vague to determine their land use.

We were excited to learn that nearly three out of four projects awarded will be adopting more than one practice; furthermore, nearly one in four projects will be adopting four or more practices! Numerous studies have demonstrated that combining Healthy Soils practices has a synergistic effect on soil health and GHG emissions.

Cover cropping is by far the most popular practice with more than half (39) of the projects planning to adopt it. Compost applications to perennial crops (21) and annual crops (18), mulching (14), and hedgerow planting (16) are also quite popular, with more than a quarter of projects including those practices. The “herbaceous cover practices” (e.g. contour buffer strips, field border, filter strip, etc.) seemed to be the least popular, with at best a handful of projects planning to adopt those practices. However, it is important to remember that in order to be eligible for any of the “herbaceous or woody cover practices,” an applicant had to adopt or maintain an existing “soil management practice.” This likely prevented some farmers and ranchers who were interested solely in the “herbaceous or woody practices” from applying.

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How Midwestern Farmers Could Help Save the Gulf of Mexico

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Author: Tom Philpott | Published: July/August 2017

This cool technique can rescue sea creatures and soil—so why aren’t more farmers using it?

If you pay state taxes in Maryland, you fund a program that gives farmers as much as $90 per acre—$22,500 annually for a typical corn operation—to plant a crop that’s not even intended for harvest. This absurd-sounding initiative cost the state’s coffers a cool $24 million in 2015.

Yet I come not to expose a government boon­doggle, but to praise an effort crucial to saving our most valuable fisheries. Let me explain.

Every summer, an algal bloom stretches along the Chesapeake Bay, the most productive estuary in the continental United States. As the algae dies, it sucks oxygen from the water, suffocating or driving away marine life. Cleaning up the dead zones would lead to more productive fisheries, increased tourism, and higher property values—benefits that would total $22 billion per year, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

What drives the algal blooms is what makes corn grow tall: nitrogen. The corn that farmers plant sucks up 50 percent or less of the nitrogen in the fertilizer they apply in the spring. But come harvest, there are no plants to absorb the excess, and so it leaches into streams and runs off into the bay—where it fertilizes a bumper crop of algae.

By paying farmers to plant a winter-­hardy crop like rye right after corn is harvested in the fall, Maryland is trying to solve that problem. The rye absorbs the excess nitrogen and is typically harvested in the spring—before it matures into an actual grain crop—to make way for corn and soybeans. The chaff is either tilled under or left as is; when farmers plant into it, the dead vegetation crowds out weeds.

The program owes its origins largely to a 1998 University of Maryland study that showed planting rye after corn reduced nitrate leaching by about 80 percent. When cover crops were used for seven straight seasons, the researchers found, the nitrate levels in the water table dropped by 50 percent or more. Now, more than half of all corn and soybean acres in Maryland are covered in the winter, keeping 3.4 million pounds of nitrogen out of the Chesapeake Bay.

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Ramseyers Using Nature As a Blueprint for Beef Grazing

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Published: June 6, 2017 

For thousands of years livestock roamed the plains and forests and contributed to an ecosystem that produced some of the richest soils in the world. More livestock producers are taking note of this system with a long history of proven success and working to implement it on their farms.

Jeff and Michelle Ramseyer raise around 250 cattle in an organic rotational grazing system with neighboring grain farmer, Dean McIlvaine. The Ramseyers provide the livestock and the labor while enhancing the fertility and controlling weeds on McIvaine’s farm ground for their Lone Pine Pastures operation in Wayne County, Michelle said.

“Dean actually owns the properties we have cattle on. We are a grass-fed operation. We started back in 2014 when we got the cattle. Dean is an organic crop farmer and all of the cattle are raised on organic grass. We do not feed anything other than hay and grass. Dean needed more fertility because his crops weren’t growing well. Jeff went to him and said ‘Hey we can get you more fertility, why don’t we start a grass fed operation?’ That is what we did,” Michelle said. “Our first 40 heifers were delivered in December of 2014 and we calved in March-April of 2015 and have gone from there. We graze on his cropland and we have about 200 acres of permanent pastures. We market our beef to Heinen’s Grocery Store and we have freezer beef we sell in the community. We also have organic raised pork in an open barn with outside access.”

Emulating nature is the goal behind the beef operation. The Ramseyer operation has drawn from the experience of Gabe Brown from North Dakota. Brown was a speaker at the Soil Health Field Day at the farm of Dave Brandt in early April where he shared about his work with regenerative agriculture involving crop and livestock production.

“No matter where I go, I am 100% confident that the principles I use to get our ranch to be an ecosystem in North Dakota are the same no matter where I’m talking. It will work on your operation. The principles are the same anywhere,” Brown said. “Nature has been around for thousands of years. That is the model we need to emulate. There is another way of doing things and the way I found that works best is nature’s way.”

Brown completely changed the way he was farming to put a focus on building up his soils rather than degrading them.

“In nature there is no mechanical disturbance. That is a fact. There is always armor on the soil surface. Nature tries to cover herself. Nature cycles water very efficiently. Through our farming practices we’ve destroyed that water cycle. We need to heal it. In nature there are living plant root networks and those networks are very efficient at building the biology,” Brown said. “The greatest geological force on earth is life itself. Plants take in CO2 out of the atmosphere photosynthesis occurs and a portion of that is translocated to the roots where it is leaked out as exudates. That is how all of us in production agriculture get our profits. We have to have that functioning properly to make a profit. Part of that root exudate is converted carbonic acid that breaks down the rocks to make nutrients available to the plants. It is the biology in the soil that makes nutrients available. The fungal network is also very important.”

Tillage and synthetic fertilizer release carbon and the result is degraded soil. Brown has implemented a system that minimizes synthetic fertilizer and tillage while maximizing soil biology and plant root growth in the soil with a no-till/cover crop system that also includes intensive livestock grazing.

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Earth Talk: How Are Farms and Farmers Dealing With Climate Change?

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Authors: Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss |  Published: June 5, 2017 

Agriculture may well be one of the industries hardest hit by the effects of global warming. The non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading environmental advocacy group, reports that warming-related drought and flooding is already behind tens of billions of dollars in American agricultural losses annually. Given this growing threat, more and more farmers are looking to incorporate tools and techniques — let alone switch up what crops they grow — to be prepared for the big environmental changes already underway.

According to Washington State University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture & Natural Resources (CSANR), some of the most promising warming-friendly farming technologies and practices include conservation tillage (stirring up the soil less), precision agriculture (which employs information technology to monitor crop development, refine soil inputs and optimize growing conditions), improved cropping systems (refining the sequence of which crops follow each other on a given piece of land), and anaerobic digestion of organic wastes (via capturing methane waste and turning it into useable energy).

NRDC has been working on sustainable agriculture for decades, and recently launched its Climate Resistant Farms campaign to focus on helping farmers roll with the punches of global warming through implementation of some of these new techniques. The group works directly with farmers to develop and share some of these best practices regarding soil health and water use.

“Climate change and extreme weather will likely have detrimental impacts on crop production, but farmers can use cover crops and other soil stewardship practices to make their farms more resilient to the climate change impacts already being felt and those likely to come in the years ahead,” reports NRDC. “Such practices can also help to reduce and capture the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.”

NRDC analyzed the carbon capture and water-holding benefits of soil stewardship methods to increase soil organic matter in the 10 highest-value-producing agricultural states in the U.S. They found that “using cover crops on just half of the acres devoted to the nation’s two most ubiquitous crops — corn and soybeans — in those top 10 states could help capture more than 19 million metric tons of carbon each year and help soils retain an additional trillion gallons of water.”

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Why It’s Time to Stop Punishing Our Soils With Fertilizers

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Author: Richard Schiffman | Published: May 3, 2017 

The soil health movement has been in the news lately, and among its leading proponents is U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) researcher Rick Haney. In a world where government agencies and agribusiness have long pursued the holy grail of maximum crop yield, Haney preaches a different message: The quest for ever-greater productivity — using fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and whatever other chemicals are at hand — is killing our soil and threatening our farms.

Haney, who works with the USDA’s Agriculture Research Service in Texas, conducts online seminars and travels the country teaching farmers how to create healthy soil. His message is simple: Although the United States has some of the richest soils in the world, decades of agricultural abuse have taken their toll, depleting the dirt of essential nutrients and killing off bacteria and fungi that create organic material essential to plants.  “Our mindset nowadays is that if you don’t put down fertilizer, nothing grows,” says Haney, who has developed a well-known method for testing soil health. “But that’s just not true, and it never has been.”

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Haney describes how research is validating the value of natural methods such as plowing less, growing cover crops, and using biological controls to keep pests in check. In the face of a proposed 21 percent cut in the USDA’s budget by the Trump administration, Haney also stressed the importance of unbiased, government studies in a field where research is often dominated by the very corporations that benefit from overuse of fertilizers and chemicals. “We need more independent research,” Haney maintains. “We are only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we understand about how soil functions and its biology.”

Yale Environment 360: You’ve been working with farmers to improve their soil?

Rick Haney: That’s right. We know that over the past 50 years the levels of organic matter — it is kind of a standard test for soil in terms of its health and fertility — have been going way down. That’s alarming. We see organic matter levels in some fields of 1 percent or less. Whereas you can go to a pasture sitting right next to it where organics levels are 5 percent or 6 percent. So that is how drastically we have altered these systems. We are destroying the organic matter in the soil, and we’ve got to bring that back to sustain life on this planet.

The good news is that soil will come back if you give it a chance. It is very robust and resilient. It’s not like we have destroyed it to the point where it can’t be fixed. The soil health movement is trying to bring those organic levels back up and get soil to a higher functioning state.

e360: What has caused this decline in soil quality?

Haney: We see that when there is a lot of tillage, no cover crops, a system of high intensity [chemical-dependent] farming, that the soil just doesn’t function properly. The biology is not doing much. It’s not performing as we need it to. We are essentially destroying the functionality of soil, so that you have to feed it more and more synthetic fertilizers just to keep growing this crop.

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Can We Really Regenerate Our Soils?

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Author: Gabe Brown |Published: January 1, 2017 

Phone calls, emails and even a few old-fashioned letters — all say the same thing. As I travel presenting at conferences and workshops, the statement comes up repeatedly.

If only I had a dollar for the number of times I had people tell me, “Gabe, you just don’t understand that our soils are not like yours.” I have learned to listen patiently (OK, sometimes not so patiently) as these people tell me all the reasons my soils are productive, and theirs are not.

When they finish, I ask them what they imagine their land looked like pre-European settlement. To this I usually receive a puzzled look.

My point is this: How is it that these lands were once healthy, functioning ecosystems? What changed between then and now? Could it be that we are the reason our land is no longer as productive as it once was? Could it be we are the reason that our soils do not function properly?

We get a lot of visitors to our ranch, more than 2,100 last summer alone. I think most come wanting a “silver bullet.” What we show them is simply how to use the principles of nature to their advantage.

I make it a point to show the difference between soils on our ranch and those of nearby operations. All have the same soil types.

The accompanying table shows soil testing results for four operations in my neighborhood. The one titled “Organic” is just that — an organic operation that is very diverse in its cropping system. The operator grows spring wheat, barley, oats, corn, sunflowers, peas, soybeans, dry edible beans and alfalfa. Natural, organic fertilizers are used. No livestock are integrated onto this cropland.
gabejan17table1

In the “No-till, low diversity” operation, the operator plants only flax and spring wheat in a cropping rotation. Anhydrous ammonia is used, and no livestock are on the land. Crop yields are about average for the area.

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Cover Crops May Be Used to Mitigate and Adapt to Climate Change

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Published: April 17, 2017 

Climate-change mitigation and adaptation may be additional, important ecosystem services provided by cover crops, said Jason Kaye, professor of soil biogeochemistry in the College of Agricultural Sciences. He suggested that the climate-change mitigation potential of cover crops is significant, comparable to other practices, such as no-till.

“Many people have been promoting no-till as a climate-mitigation tool, so finding that cover crops are comparable to no-till means there is another valuable tool in the toolbox for agricultural climate mitigation,” he said.

In a recent issue of Agronomy for Sustainable Development — the official journal of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, Europe’s top agricultural research institute and the world’s number two center for the agricultural sciences — Kaye contends that cover cropping can be an adaptive management tool to maintain yields and minimize nitrogen losses as the climate warms.

Collaborating with Miguel Quemada in the Department of Agriculture Production at the Technical University of Madrid in Spain, Kaye reviewed cover-cropping initiatives in Pennsylvania and central Spain. He said that lessons learned from cover cropping in those contrasting regions show that the strategy has merit in a warming world.

The researchers concluded that cover-crop effects on greenhouse-gas fluxes typically mitigate warming by 100-150 grams of carbon per square meter per year, which is comparable to, and perhaps higher than, mitigation from transitioning to no-till. The key ways that cover crops mitigate climate change from greenhouse-gas fluxes are by increasing soil carbon sequestration and reducing fertilizer use after legume cover crops.

“Perhaps most significant, the surface albedo change — the proportion of energy from sunlight reflecting off of farm fields due to cover cropping — calculated for the first time in our review using case-study sites in central Spain and Pennsylvania, may mitigate 12 to 46 grams of carbon per square meter per year over a 100-year time horizon,” Kaye wrote.

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Mapping the Benefits of Farm Biodiversity

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Author: Liz Carlisle | Published: April 3, 2017 

Ninety miles south of San Francisco, the farm town of Watsonville looks like it may have been the inspiration for the Beatles hit “Strawberry Fields Forever.” In wintertime, long strips of black plastic cover the earth, as growers fumigate next year’s strawberry beds with compounds like chloropicrin, which has been designated by both the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation as an air contaminant.

Because strawberries are so often planted on their own here, year after year, the industry has resorted to these chemicals to control soil-borne fungal diseases like verticilium, which thrive in the company of their strawberry hosts. But organic grower Javier Zamora has a different strategy.

“I make sure before and after strawberries there’s always something different,” said Zamora, whose JSM Organic Farms has expanded from 1.5 acres to over 100 acres in just five years. “I normally plant broccoli right after—no potatoes, no tomatoes, no eggplant in the three years between strawberries. Those things host the same diseases.” Diversifying his crops hasn’t completely eliminated pests, Zamora said, but it’s made them easier to manage so they don’t damage his harvest. It also relieves the pressure of soil-borne diseases.

In addition to carefully planning his crop rotation, Zamora also mixes things up by intercropping—planting marigolds at the end of his strawberry beds and perennial flowers like lavender in between them.

“Every flower will have a benefit of hosting some beneficial insects and it’s also something I can sell at market,” Zamora said. An immigrant from Michoacán, Mexico, Zamora enrolled in community college at age 43 before entering the Agriculture and Land-Based training Association (ALBA) program to pursue organic farming. He attributes his success to his disciplined crop planning and attention to soil health. “When you’re very diversified like I am,” Zamora said, “you have to be on top of your game. I already know where my 2018 strawberries are going to be planted.”

Using ‘Distant Genetic Cousins’ to Improve Farming

While Zamora has been planning out his rotations, a postdoctoral researcher two hours north in Berkeley has been analyzing dozens of studies of farms that grow a diversity of plants and rotate their crops, to try to understand which rotations promote better pest control. David Gonthier, who was recently hired as an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky, has no doubt that crop rotation is an effective tool for breaking up pest and disease cycles, as well as improving soil health, managing nutrient balance, and improving water retention—benefits that ecologists have corroborated in recent studies from Iowa to Ontario.

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