Cover Crops in California
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Over 20 years ago, Petty Ranch began planting cover crops to improve soil health in their Ventura County avocado orchards. Fifth-generation farmer Chris Sayer says since then, their operation has seen big improvements in soil organic matter, better water infiltration, and significant irrigation savings.
Sayer… “When the rainy season's over, we can probably get, you know, several weeks or months farther down the road before we have to actually fire up the pumps and start pumping groundwater. That's allowing us to actually irrigate our avocados at less than 75% of the classic rule of thumb for the amount of irrigation water you need.”
Sayer says, with the excess water, they’re able to dry-farm their cover crops and rely solely on winter rains.
Sayer… “So the way I view it is, our cover crops are dry farmed. You know, none of our irrigation water is applied to growing the cover crops with the exception of literally only a couple hundred square feet where we'll try to get some filter strip established before at some of our orchard grains so that any sediment leaves and sticks and debris gets caught in the filter strip instead of going down the drain and off into the watershed. But yeah, so we dry farm those. We rely on using the winter rains to create, you know, the more biomass for the soil. And then in the summer, that biomass helps to redrain the water.”
Again, that’s Chris Sayer of Petty Ranch.
