Compaction and Cover Crops
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
In areas where soil compaction is a concern, farmers say tillage can actually be helpful to keep fields productive. But tillage comes at a cost of time, fuel, and equipment. Instead, Quentin Coneally says he began experimenting with cover crops as a way to address compaction on his farm.
Coneally… “ Just like doing all this tillage and spending all this extra time out there, burning fuel, expensive track tractors—and this one hard part about my area, we're so flat, and we get a lot of compaction, so we do have to break it up. But that's why I started cover cropping a couple years ago when we had the unfortunate event of flood. It just seemed like a good opportunity to incorporate cover crops into the operation and see if we could actually get away from some of this tillage and make a healthier, more nutrient-dense crop.”
Coneally says his early results are promising.
Coneally… “ In the first year, the agronomist really liked. It seems like it's really soaking up the grounds like a sponge. It's soft underneath. And then we got a decent crop off the ground, so that's always a positive. Just with all the extra inputs of drilling a cover crop and terminating a cover crop, I was kind of worried about the ROI on it. I haven't totally broke it down yet. It’s still kinda early, but seems like a good route. I only did it on, I don't know, probably a quarter of my acres. So it's not something you just jump into being that uncertain how it works down here. It's a little more common in the hills because you fight erosion and stuff like that. But down here it's mainly just compaction and flood stuff.”
Once again, that’s Quentin Coneally.
