The South East Research Farm at Redvers is working on cover crops – practices that keep living roots in the soil beyond the harvest of our traditional crops.
While cover crops are viewed as a regenerative agriculture practice, many worry that they reduce yields for the primary crops.
Kevin Hursh of SaskAgToday.com talked with Lana Shaw, executive director of the South East Research Farm about the cover crop work they’re doing.
"We're looking at things like underseeding, where we have an understory crop that is seeded at a low density. It's kind of like planting your own weeds that you know you can tolerate and you know you can kill when you want to. And ideally something that will continue growing into the fall or however, depending on when you want to be able to kill it. It could winter kill on its own or it could still be growing in the spring depending on what the objectives are and what you've planted.
"And then we've got another project where we're trying to figure out do volunteers have benefits basically acting like a cover crop. Because all the farmers say, 'Well, I have a cover crop, it's just my oat volunteers.' Well, now we have a project that is trying to quantify the effects of that. Whether that will be officially recognized as a cover crop in some programs, not necessarily. But potentially as a soil health benefit, there could be some good things about leaving some volunteers in place." Shaw told Hursh at the Convergence Conference in Regina.
She said cover crops can "have the ability to influence water infiltration into the soil", especially soil that is "prone to crusting or that don't have great structure."
"You don't really increase soil structure that much by deep ripping or just dragging some more and more tools through the soil. That doesn't improve soil structure." she added.
Hursh asked if cover crops have more potential in areas with higher moisture, Shaw said it has potential in the black/grey soil zones of the province but outside of that area "maybe there's very certain instances where it makes sense in a sort of prescription applied effort." She recommends perennials in drier regions rather than cover crops.
Shaw also notes food companies are interested in cover crops as a regenerative practice, given their environmental goals.
"A lot of them are trying to maintain their supply chains in the face of a lot of varying climate and just extremes in the climate. So they're trying to create more resilient supply chains, more resilient sourcing regions and help farmers to become more resilient with their operations." she said.
That said, there are some who believe it works while others disagree. For Shaw, they're trying to find the middle ground by trying to figure out "in what situations might it be helpful and then try to research it, try to understand it, measure it."
"So we're actually measuring the soil moisture and temperatures and salinity effects of using it instead of just making claims. Because either you can make claims that they're bad, you can make claims that they're good. Well, who's out there measuring it? We are." she stated.
