Tuesday, November 6, 2007 - 1:35 PM
149-8

Cover Crop Management with Speciality Equipment for Organic No-till.

David Wilson, The Rodale Institute, 611 Siegfriedale Road, Kutztown, PA 19530

Conventional no-till management is one of the most widely promoted conservation strategies in agriculture today. But the overall environmental impact of standard no-till is mixed. Concerns about water quality, escalating fuel prices, signs of herbicide resistance in weeds and increased U.S. dependence on foreign fertilizer sources all point to the need for a new, improved system of no-till farming, one which relies less on synthetic inputs and more on biological systems. The Rodale Institute has developed an organic no-till system using cover crops to build fertility and suppress weeds. Standing cover crops are converted to vegetative mulch with the use of an innovative, front- or rear-mounted roller-crimper implement. A three-year study is currently testing this system under diverse field conditions with a range of crops and cover crops. Eight researcher-farmer teams in California, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Mississippi and Virginia are running on-station and on-farm trials using mechanically killed cover crops as the primary weed management strategy. Although challenges have been encountered with cover crop timing, moisture dynamics and planter engineering, the best results have shown corn and soybean yields outperforming organic-plow-till and conventional controls.

Back to Symposium--Building Sustainable Ecosystems Through Organic Agricultural Research and Practice: II
Back to A08 Integrated Agricultural Systems

Back to The ASA-CSSA-SSSA International Annual Meetings (November 4-8, 2007)