|
Rolla, ND | The major difficulty with ideas like your spreading of red clover is that our weather is very variable. Doing such as you describe would work some years. How many years of seed would you willingly buy in order to get a catch? I would also assume you are talking winter wheat while most of ours is spring wheat. The way things have been the last few years, in order to get the clover to grow after herbicides you would be talking spreading in July or at least late June. Crop comes off in hopefully August, sometimes September, occassionally after freez up. Average first killing frost here is September 20. Anhydrous applications start in ernest October 1.
At one time one of the experiment stations was all excited about the idea of growing two crops in the same field at the same time. It works, about one year in four. By the time you get through a cycle, the increase in the one year doesn't pay it's way. A cover crop is pretty much the same.
The problem is, that we are too wet, or too dry and there isn't much window for growth, the amount of benefit becomes less than the cost of the seed. The most consistent thing about our weather is it is inconsistent. We do pretty much tend to have a pretty cold period each year between crops but even that may start in October or December, end February or May, and so on. People kind of get trained to really go when they can go, and trying to get too many things happening just tends to overload the system.
We do get fall growth from volunteers if conditions are good for growth. I've seen peas blooming again, canola blooming again, and barley headed out, flax blooming, wheat doesn't usually make heading. Some years we can't get the seed to grow in the fall. So any second growth happens if and when conditions are there for it to happen.
The biggest thing we do for OM is we keep our fields in the refrigerator and that preserves it. That's why OM increases as you move north. We don't have near so much that cycles in the course of a year as people would further south where it is warmer.
The other thing done for OM is reduction in tillage. Some people claim huge, simply huge increases from no-till, but that tends to be partly a lab increase. If a guy claims a gain in organic material measured in tons and he isn't putting the nitrogen into the system for that to happen, I don't consider it a real gain, it is short term surface residue or lab results skewed by that surface residue getting mixed in the sample.
The other thing that is done is to grow good crops. It doesn't make much sense to grow half a wheat crop and try to do all sorts of things to get some other thing to grow out there to get some OM. Best thing to do is to grow your OM as your main crop.
Basically changes in OM occur because of other factors, it isn't important enough in and of itself here to put cash inputs in in order to get it. Reduced tillage has been a response to learning to grow crops annually and to increased costs of tillage and chemical control of weeds. Bigger crops have been breeding, fertilizer and chemicals and engineering to get the seed in the ground the fertilizer where it needs to be and so on. There hasn't been a system here yet that works or doesn't work due to concerns about OM. OM is mainly something used to get political support for something, funding for research and to make us all feel warm and fuzzy about ourselves.
Oh I almost forgot, the other really big differences you see in OM traces back to who takes care of their land and prevents it from eroding and who doesn't. I can remember a farmer who called the Extension agent the first year I was here. We had had a rather intense wind storm and he was farming some lighter land. Big areas of what he was farming had blown down to the point where you could see where the cultivator shovels had run. The area of compaction that the shovels had created was enough harder that it held. (Who says compaction is all bad) The reason he was calling was he was wondering if since the soil was gone, if the Treflan that he had applied was also gone. It was kind of funny to see the face of the Extension Agent. Treflan was gone, but interestingly, the green foxtail seed was enough bigger that it stayed. Grass weed populations in the thousands per square yard helped keep the land in place the rest of the summer and start to rebuild OM levels. I know of a quarter that he farmed for years right next to one that another farmer I know got at the same time. At the time they got it say 40 years ago, the one the guy who had land blow away, go the better quarter. Today, the one the other farmer got consistently produces big crops, and the other produces fair crops. On paper, I doubt if there was much difference in crops, but the one was always concerned about his fields and took care of them, the other didn't. It shows today and will for years.
Marv
Edited by BigNorsk 9/21/2006 10:06
| |
|
Question for the northerners (Bignorsk et all)
