Howdy! Here is another french assignment I translated into english:
The origin of cover crops goes back a very long time to the time of the Egyptians, when they planted cover crops to prevent soil erosion and to keep water in the soil longer. Today, many farmers still use this practice for the same reasons.
Cover crops are a mixture of multiple plants such as sorghum, millet, sun hemp, soybeans, buckwheat, and many other plants. Here are some ideas for mixtures:
- Sorghum, millet, soybeans, buckwheat, sunflower, and flax.
- flax, sorghum, sun hemp, buckwheat, and sunflower.
- Tillage radish, vech, millet, sorghum, sunflower, and soybeans.
Last year Dad and I planted mix # 2 and cut it for forage. Here are some cover crop pictures and a little video of dad cutting the forage.
Sometimes you can use plants like corn and when it gets a foot or two tall, you can plant wheat in the middle of the rows. Another method of using cover crops is to plant a crop early in the year, and when that crop is a foot or two tall, you can plant wheat in it to give the soil better yield. As you can see in the picture below, the tractor is pacting the cover crops and planting the wheat or etc.
You can also graze animals in the covered plants. Our cows love to graze in our cover crop fields.
And that’s why you should also encourage local farmers to start using cover crops!
And that’s it!
JakeL blog 