Millet is used by some farmers as a cover crop.
Suddenly, “cover crops” seem to be everywhere — popping up between rows of corn, being sown into winter wheat stubble, sprawling all over the pages of farm magazines, and sprouting on the agenda of nearly every farm meeting.
Could this be the beginning of a cropping revolution, one that will introduce new opportunities for graziers to work with their cropping neighbours? I hope so. Cash croppers are working grasses, legumes and brassicas into their rotations, with an eye to boosting soil fertility and structure, and preventing erosion. At the same time, they’re growing some pretty decent short-term pasture — if only they had stock to graze it.
Now imagine you’re a lonely grass farmer surrounded by cash croppers. Your farm is an island of grass and cattle in an ocean of wheat and canola. You’ve mused about expansion, but land costs make it tough to rent or buy more acres. What if there’s a low-cost grazing opportunity right next door? What if your corn or cereal-growing neighbour is also tossing grass and legumes, even turnips and radishes into his cropping mix? Think about it: grazing for the stock, and urine and dung for the soil.
“It’s a win-win,” says Graeme Finn, an ebullient Australian (is there another kind?) working with cover crops on his Alberta ranch. “All it takes is a hot wire, and then you're off to the races. It's a no-brainer, as far as I'm concerned.”
Graeme Finn runs a year-round grazing program on about 2,800 acres near Madden, Alberta. Along with conventional grass/legume mixes, he uses a diverse group of cover crops to extend the grazing season.
“People are starting to think about healthier soils now,” adds Finn, who runs a year-round grazing program on about 2,800 acres near Madden, Alberta. Along with conventional grass/legume mixes, he uses a diverse group of cover crops to extend the grazing season. Winter forage (some of it swath-grazed) is supplied by a mix of cereals, including winter wheat, oats, barley, or triticale and sweet clover.
The summer mix is more exotic: brassicas, including radish/turnip hybrids, forage rapes and leafy kale-like cultivars, legumes including hairy vetch, crimson clover, forage peas, and grasses including Italian ryegrass and sorghum. He also adds cereals, such as oats, to fill out the mix. “Last year I had millet and Ethiopian cabbage in there, but they didn't work. In some areas in Alberta and Saskatchewan they worked really well, but in my area we're too close to the Rockies and our weather is too cool,” he says.
As Finn says, cover crops appeal to growers who are keen to try something new. “There are no written rules with this stuff.”
For cash croppers the goal is to keep the soil covered, and maintain plant growth to feed the many billions of creatures — fungi, microbes, roots and insects — that are active beneath the surface.
Keeping the ground covered isn’t such a big deal for pasture-based operations, where perennial pastures feed livestock and nourish the soil. But annual forages and cover-crop mixtures offer gains for graziers, too. If you’ve got an ongoing crop rotation on the farm, adding a cover crop might gain a few months of grazing on either end of the crop season. Cover crops also come in handy during slow-growth or recovery periods for perennial pastures, including the mid-summer, and autumn/early winter.
Then there are times an existing field needs to be rotated or renovated to suppress weeds, pests, or diseases, or to repair winterkill in a stand of alfalfa. Because of alfalfa’s autoxicity — the tendency of established stands to suppress competition from new alfalfa plants — you’ve got to plant something else for a year before sowing a new stand of alfalfa. A cover crop fits the bill.
Organic farmers use ploughdown “green manure” crops to build soil fertility. At the University of Manitoba, Plant Science Prof. Martin Entz is studying ways to integrate grazing livestock with cover crops in organic rotations. When organic grain producers shift to a nitrogen-building green manure crop, “you’re setting that land aside for an entire growing season,” Entz says. “So getting income off of there is really critical. Grazing is a good way of doing that.”
In a research paper Entz wrote with fellow researcher Joanne Thiessen Martens, the duo suggest livestock grazed on “green manure” crops produce about 175 kilograms per hectare of weight gain. Based on 2011 prices, that’s a return of $385-$770 per hectare.
Better still, cattle and sheep convert all those green leaves and stems into what Entz and Thiessen Martens call “highly plant-available forms” of nutrients, or what farmers (politely) call dung and urine.
Here’s where I see cover crops offering bonuses to livestock producers and their cash crop neighbours: In many crop-intensive parts of the country, it’s hard to find grazing land. But if your corn-or-wheat-growing neighbour is using cover crops, why not strike a deal to graze those crops? To sweeten the deal, you could offer to sow the cover crops or supply the seed. You’ll probably have to install temporary electric fencing, and it might be neighbourly to drop off some steaks or chops at barbecue season.
The benefits are obvious: You get low-cost grazing. Your neighbour gets his cover crops and other residue, including corn stalks, transformed into soil-building manure.
When I ran this idea past Ontario cattleman and crop producer, Mike Buis, he immediately came up with a catchy name for it: the “Graze Thy Neighbour” strategy. Buis is located in Kent County, in deepest southwestern Ontario, not far from Detroit, Michigan. He knows all about the difficulties of finding pasture in a sea of corn, soybeans, and vegetable crops. “We’re in an area where it’s predominately vegetable crops — sweet corn, tomatoes, green beans, peas,” he says. “Our land prices are really high, $15,000-$20,000 an acre, if you can find it.”
Buis runs 100 acres of permanent pasture, and then grazes crop residue such as corn stover and cover crops right through the region’s relatively mild winter. In the summer, many of his cattle are moved to a drylot, and fed a mixed ration drawn in part from the area’s food processors. “We take advantage of everything we can,” he says. “Because we’re in a vegetable growing and processing region, we can feed carrots, peelings, tops, sweet corn silage, shucklage from seed corn, you name it.”
Buis adds that rebuilding fences in this largely unfenced area is a major cost. But “we figure if we fence off 100 acres, within five years you’ve got it paid off in feed savings.”
“Graze Thy Neighbour” won’t work for everyone, but if you can strike this sort of deal, it’s good for you, for your neighbour, and for the soil you both rely on. If you’ve got the stock, and your neighbour has the crops, you can both achieve more by working together.
- Ray Ford