If you’re leery of investing time and money into cover crops because you may not reap the benefits right away, take a closer look at the advantages they offer.
These crops—typically grown between the harvest and the planting season of your cash crop—offer many benefits, including preventing soil erosion, managing soil fertility, managing soil quality and water retention, and managing weeds, pests and diseases in your fields. They can also improve wildlife habitats and diversity, and create forage for your livestock. Here are more details you should know.
Managing Pests
When it comes to pest management cover crops can create a diversion to lure pests away from your main crop. In this capacity, cover crops are grown in the same season as your cash crop and they attract pests to what the pests perceive is a more accommodating habitat. Once the insects are drawn in numbers large enough to reduce their population the cover crops can be treated with a pesticide. This process has earned them the cool nickname of “trap crops.” For organic trap crops some farmers drive over their fields using a vacuum-based tool to physically remove pests from the crops. Keep in mind that, in addition to this function, the cover crop is still working to manage soil fertility, quality, and water retention, and to suppress weeds and prevent disease and soil erosion.
The white mustard plant, which can provide high-protein forage for your livestock and is rich in nitrogen for the soil, and the radish plant are used as trap crops in a different way. They trap nematodes. When nematodes hatch they are attracted to the roots of these plants. They enter the roots but cannot reproduce inside because the plants have a hypersensitive resistance reaction. So the nematode population is drastically reduced.
Managing Wildlife Habitats and Diversity
Cover crops can improve habitats for wildlife on your farm by introducing another element of plant diversity to your cash crop rotation. This, along with less intensive field management afforded by cover crops, increases the possibility for the development of a more complex food web that can foster a higher degree of wildlife diversity.
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