I had the pleasure of participating in an agricultural conference called “FarmSmart” held at the University of Guelph. I was in a discussion panel with two of my peers to discuss our individual fertilizer strategies and have the room ask us questions about our methods.
I had some really good questions from the crowd that revolved around compaction.
The questions were:
- What Tire pressure are we running our planter tires?
- Are you concerned about compaction or deep compaction?
I’m going to take some time in the next couple of days to compose some information on how we deal with this problem in our fields and see if i can give these gentleman a complete answer to their questions.
In the meantime due to popular demand i am posting slides from my powerpoint presentation on our fertilizer application strategy.
Ryan,
I enjoyed your talk at FarmSmart, January 22nd. It’s great to see someone else growing red clover as a harvestable crop and using a long rotation. I still have some improvements to make to my RC system as the crop matured unevenly and I didn’t get it harvested in time. However, the benefit red clover will give to the following crop of potatoes will be well worth it. Further to our conversation, here are a few links you might enjoy.
1. Steve Groff is a no-till vegetable and grain & oilseed farmer from Pennsylvania. He has taken cover cropping to a whole new level using mixes of up to 12 different plant varieties at once. He strives to keep his soil covered at all times with a living cover crop and has made some real improvements to his soil. I heard him speak at Acres USA conf in December and he will be speaking at this year’s Innovative Farmers Assoc of Ontario annual meeting. His website is http://www.cedarmeadowfarm.com.
2. It is possible to have the best of both worlds (reduced pesticides and no-till). The Rodale institute has been perfecting no-till organic farming. It’s more rotational tillage than no-till and uses mechanically killed cover crops as a mulch to be planted into. The mulch suppresses weeds until the crop can establish a canopy. Follow this link to a short video, featuring Jeff Moyer who explains it well, http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/no-till_revolution
3. It gets better. . . Ron Morse from Virginia Tech, developed the subsurface tiller transpanter (SST-T) that is capable of no-till tranplanting vegetables into standing cover crops. This thing can even plant potatoes into a rye/vetch cover planted on a raised bed. I hope to try this on my own farm and would love to do this on a large scale.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDs19i0SXZc&NR=1
Great feedback Isaiah. I will dig into these items further. In our vegetable production we are experimenting with living mulch systems and I appriciate the lead on someone who is playing with this aswell. I will post some pictures and video’s on our experiments when things green up in the spring.