Donald J. (Buck) Ross, who has years of experience with cover crops, thinks the federal and provincial governments should offer farmers an incentive of about $300 per acre to adopt the technology.
He figures that would cost about $1 billion a year in Ontario alone but would be much less expensive than some other carbon-reducing programs and subsidies and would stimulate rural economies.
At $300 an acre, he figures farmers would plant cover crops on about a third of the province’s 27 million arable acres. Those crops would take carbon out of the atmosphere, which is better than alternative policies which usually only reduce carbon emissions.
Ross uses cover crops mainly after harvesting wheat on his 700-acre spread between Moorefield and Arthur, but sometimes plants a cover if he’s able to achieve an early harvest of soybeans.
The mixtures he plants are combinations of oats, yellow semi-leafless peas, tillage radish, turnip, sorghum-Sudan grass, sunflowers, rye, clovers and phacelia.
The combinations depend on what he’s aiming to achieve.
He also routinely plants red clover with his winter wheat. His cash crop rotation is the standard wheat, corn and soybeans.
He usually sprays glyphosate (such as Roundup) on the cover crops before winter, leaving the plant cover to protect the field from wind and water erosion until spring when he tills before planting.
He needs to till the cover crop, rather than use no-till planting, because he needs the spring soil warmth in his relatively cool part of Southwestern Ontario.
But he is convinced that cover crops need a $300-an-acre incentive from governments to achieve widespread adoption. “I know there are farmers who think they can do it for less,” says Ross. “But we have been doing this for long enough that we’ve got a pretty good handle on what it costs.”
One of the major benefits is much-improved soil health, but the profits from that are elusive, given the high rate of variability in crop growing conditions from year to year.
This year the payoff was substantial, he says, with yields for corn and soybeans that were well above the already-high provincial averages.
One of the big reasons for that yield boost was moisture-retention caused by the increased organic matter in his fields.
There are other significant benefits, such as increased worm populations because they thrive on tillage radish and turnips, and increased populations of beneficial root-zone microbes.
Ontario’s Environment Commissioner, Dianne Saxe, recently released a special report on agriculture that said the same things as Ross, including a call for incentives for farmers to adopt technologies that reduce greenhouse gases.
- Jim Romahn