Preventing Erosion and Managing Fertility on Your North Florida Farm

Cover crops are off-season crops that you grow between the harvest and the planting season of your cash crop. They offer a great many benefits, including preventing soil erosion, managing soil fertility, quality, and water, and suppressing weeds, pests and diseases in your fields. They also create forage for your livestock. If you’re leery of investing time and finances into cover crops, since they won’t likely yield direct income, take a closer look at their benefits.

Preventing Erosion

Soil erosion can severely diminish the productive capacity of your fields as the velocity of rainfall hits the surface of your soil and causes splashing and runoff. Growing a dense cover crop can minimize this damage and allow rain to trickle through to your soil while the crop’s roots help hold the soil in place.

Managing Fertility

Cover crops make your soil healthier. They can increase its fertility and provide one of the main nutrients needed for crop production: nitrogen.

Legumes make great cover crops and are used to fix atmospheric nitrogen for use by subsequent crops, as well as prevent soil erosion, produce biomass, suppress weeds and attract beneficial insects.

Legume cover crops that are commonly used are: winter annuals like field peas, crimson clover, subterranean clover, and hair vetch. Perennials such as white clover and red clover, and biennials like sweet clover.

Winter-annual legumes tend to produce the majority of their biomass and nitrogen in spring. In many regions these legumes must be planted earlier than cereal crops so they can survive winter. Depending on climate you’ll likely have to balance early planting of your cash crop with waiting to allow more biomass and nitrogen production by your legumes.

If you need a cover crop that will absorb excess nutrients after the application of fertilizer or manure, you should choose a grass, a brassica, or a mixture of the two.

In general, legumes are lower in carbon and higher in nitrogen than grasses. This carbon-to-nitrogen ratio causes legume residues to break down faster. The nitrogen and other nutrients in legume residues are usually released faster than from grasses.

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