Maximizing Benefits from Cover Crops
12 Jan 242 min 42 sec

Temple Rhodes says that solely relying on cover crops didn't lead to any significant changes to his soil. He talks about how he changed that with a systematic approach that impacted soil health and crop productivity, offering some valuable lessons for farmers.

00:00 Hey everybody. This is Temple Roof from Extreme Ag. It seems like it's a fairly hot topic around, um, everybody kind of talks about cover crops 00:07 and what, what it can do for their soil and so on and so forth. So we've been planting cover crops in this area for, 00:15 you know, it's been an incentive program that the government came up for our area for probably 25 to maybe almost 30 years. 00:24 We've had multiple different ones. We've done tillage radish and wheat rod barley, we've done brass in there with it. 00:30 CLN vetch. We've done just about everything. We've tried 'em all. Everybody seems to think that, hey, look, it's, it improves soil, it does this and that. 00:38 They're not wrong. It does. But after the last, I'll go back to like 15 years, up until three 00:44 or four years ago, we started, we never saw a dramatic difference. Like we didn't improve CECs, 00:51 we didn't improve our organic matter. And I know that a lot of people say that, that you can dramatically improve CECs, 00:58 you can dramatically improve, um, organic matter. And I'm not saying that you can, you can, but that takes time like a lot, a lot, a lot 01:06 of time you're not gonna see big differences. Where we've seen big differences is when we added the cover crop and putting 01:14 multiple different species on there, and then we follow it up with whether it's stalk digesters or whatever, humic and Vics. 01:22 And we started blending all these different things together. We started to see differences of where in our soil samples. 01:29 And the past three years, we've kind of ramped it up, where before we weren't seeing a ramp up. 01:35 Like we've seen minor, minor changes, but the dramatic changes came when we started adding all this other, this different approach. 01:43 You know, it's more of that systematic approach. So when you talk about cover crops, been doing it for 30 years, have we seen big differences? 01:53 Not really, but where we've seen differences, it's, it's, it's been a big help where we can get nutrients back out 01:59 of the soil, put it back into the soil, get it into our next crop. I think our crops are better, 02:04 but have we dramatically improved CECs and organic matter? Not really. Um, where we saw that improvement 02:11 is when we started using system Mac approach and we started using all these different things, IC sugars, um, stalk digesters, and adding all those things together. 02:20 When we started doing that, that's where dramatic differences can be made. So if you guys are thinking about a cover crop program, 02:27 think about a systematic approach. Don't think that cover crops are gonna do it alone, but you can do it when you use a a different approach. 02:36 See you guys soon.

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