Why are cover crops so important? A plethora of reasons, but a simple answer is this: they add biological diversity. Here’s Keith Berns on this point, from his article in this issue:
“It’s hard to get enough diversity in your cash-crop rotation, and that’s why cover crops are so important. Hats off to the people who are growing 10 or 12 different cash crops, but that’s really hard. You often need specialized knowledge, specialized equipment and specialized markets in order to do additional cash crops. But with cover crops, because you’re not taking it out to grain, and the harvesting mechanism is either a cow or simply the microbes in your soil, you don’t need specialized equipment. You don’t really need specialized knowledge, and you certainly don’t need specialized markets because your market is the soil.”
The only possible thing to take issue with in what Keith says is that there is some degree of a different type of knowledge required to grow cover crops. It’s not specialized knowledge, per se — if you know how to grow corn or lettuce or any type of annual crop you can grow rye or vetch — but it is different, and more complex than the conventional two-crop rotation. The good thing is that this knowledge is available for the learning, and Keith and others provide it in this magazine and elsewhere.
This issue of Acres U.S.A. is packed with vital information on cover crops. In fact, in our history of 640 monthly installments there may never have been another issue in which there was so much overlap of themes. Keith Berns, Tim Reinbott, Jay Fuhrer, Gary Zimmer, Patrick Freeze and Taylor Henry all write about how to apply cover crops. Read it cover to cover and you’ll find overlap in a number of lessons: how to plant rye early or late, the benefits of 60-inch rows to provide sun for a crop between rows of corn, the importance of living roots, the advantage to soil microbes of having different roots providing different exudates, and much more.
The beauty of these lessons is that they all describe the application of principles — the principles of ecological farming. These principles are of course the foundation of economically successful farms and have been the message we’ve preached every month here at Acres U.S.A. for over 50 years. It’s kind of like church: the message of the gospel is the same every week, but we have to keep hearing it over and over because it’s so counterintuitive to the way our hearts work. Same thing with the principles of ecological farming: our inclination — and everything the world tells us — is to farm in monocultures, to simply try to kill whatever threatens us, to go the easy route.
We need, instead, to rely in faith on the principles that have been handed down to us — no matter how odd that makes us seem to our neighbors.
And that’s the view from the country.
