Summer cover options suitable for later drilling – Farmers Guardian
With the drilling window for spring barley, wheat and beans closed, Ash Burbidge investigates summer cover crop management for growers looking to sell, feed or provide soil benefits this summer...
Many spring cereal and pulse growers have now completed drilling for this spring. For those who were unable to drill due to poor soil conditions or lack of drainage, however, one alternative cropping option would be a legume-based cover crop mix, according to Richard Barnes, sales manager for the Kings Crops division of Frontier.
“[A legume mix] could run from May through to September and would provide ground rooting and nitrogen-fixing properties. It also has potential for both forage cuts and grazing, but growers need to be mindful of livestock bloat when grazing fresh crops,” he says.
Whole crop silage mixes such as barley, oats, vetch and peas could also be a good summer option as they can aid soil health while providing a forage output.
“A mix could also serve as a cash crop to a livestock neighbour or provide home-grown feed for mixed farms.
Dick Neale, technical manager at Hutchinsons, says that where growers have missed the spring drilling window due to wet soil, he would advise against putting in a cover crop to graze.
Instead, he suggests growers focus on stabilising and restructuring the soil to ensure planned drilling can be completed in the future.
Growers could incorporate deep-rooted plants such as brassica-based species including buckwheat, fodder radish, tillage radish, millet, linseed and crimson clover to ‘pump’ the water out of the soil.
Wet
“Growers with wet fields are much better off drilling the next crop into green material rather than drilling into wet clay,” he says.
He does not recommend drilling a cover crop in the first few weeks of May as the weather can still be cold, which is not advantageous to the crop.
If growers are drilling into excess moisture, this can push the cover crop too far ahead, making management challenging. Therefore, he would advise waiting until June before drilling a summer cover crop.
“[If planted in May], by the middle of July, the crop is going to be a jungle, and [growers] will have to start managing it by either chopping it down or grazing it, so they cannot just leave it if they want to drill winter wheat into it in good condition,” says Mr Neale.
Cover crops can also be used within the rotation as a form of integrated pest management for some soil-borne pests such as beet cyst nematode.
Mr Barnes says that growers can use certain oil radish varieties as part of an integrated pest management approach to control nematodes in the soil.
“It does take some specialist advice and a targeted approach; it is not a broad brush,” says Mr Barnes.
The main risk with summer cover is seed shed, so it is important to choose the right crop for the right period to make sure the crop is not flowering before it has a chance to provide benefits.
Mr Barnes advises growers to destroy a buckwheat or phacelia-based cover crop when it reaches 50 per cent flowering as this is when the plants will be going into senescence and seed set, beyond which stems will become lignified and lock up a lot of nutrition.
Destruction
“Destruction needs careful consideration if you create a field-scale cover crop that might grow to between knee and waist height, as in the middle of summer it is going to have a lot of things living in it such as deer, skylarks, hares and gamebirds.
“You either need to keep the crop short by cutting it and mulching it so that nothing moves in, or you have to spray it off with glyphosate, because if you go in with a flail mower to crop that is living and chest high, you are going to cause a lot of damage to the wildlife,” he says.
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