Cover Crops: Best Way to Regenerate Soil Health Quickly

[@Green_Heart_Family_Farm]

Great review, thanks! Would love to hear follow-ups about some of your fields after you cover crop them for several more years.

[@DowdleFamilyFarms]

We plan on it. We will see how it goes!

[@PotooBurd]

Binge watching your videos back to back- and adding comments for the algorithm~! 🌻👍 Keep up the great content!

[@DowdleFamilyFarms]

Awesome! Thank you!

[@threeriversforge1997]

While I certainly like covering the soil, I'd point out that you can get much greater health in the soil biome by planting the native grasses and wildflowers rather than imported versions. We often forget that the ecosystem is actually a system, and that plants, microbes, pollinators, birds, and everything else in the area all evolved together. For example, Andropogon Gerardii is famous for rooting down 10' or more. And while current science seems to indicate that only the top foot of roots are used to collect water, we really have no idea what the Big Blue Stem is doing with the rest of the root structure it puts so much energy into developing. What we can say, though, is that the roots are obviously mining minerals from way down in the ground and bringing them to the surface in the form of their leaves. When those leaves die off in the winter, that mineral-rich organic matter is then made available to plants at the surface who have shallower rooting structures. When we look at other native plants, like the Echinacea pallida, we know it will sent a tap root down as much as 3', but we don't know exactly why. All we can say for sure is that it's playing a vital role in the mineral transfer cycle and must be important to the ecosystem since it evolved right along with the rest of the plants, insects, and microbes. Maybe the best part of using Native Grasses and Wildflowers is that you can test the hypothesis very cheaply. Thankfully, places like home depot and such are now offering naturally-occurring varieties of these plants in their landscaping departments so you can grab one or two of each and plant the in a corner somewhere. Not only are they beautiful additions to the home, but you can watch the ground to see how it responds. Digging a cross-section through a test patch will show you just how deep the roots go and how active the entire biome is.

[@DowdleFamilyFarms]

There are a lot of great native plants. Big and little bluestem, indian grass and others. Each of these mentioned are good forage for ruminants. I have run a few tests with both big and little bluestem and they have not been successful in a pasture setting yet, but I am still learning. I get a lot of comments about imported versions of plants versus native plants. While I like native grasses that are productive in permanent pastures, they cannot meet all of the needs on our farm. The most drastic example would be in feeding pigs and other monogastric animals on native grasses. The nutritional element for these native plants is not there. Cover crops can feed soil life and pigs. Granted, we can feed grain to pigs, but that grain will be imported from monoculture agriculture that tends to be more destructive for soil life than a diverse group of cover crops that regenerates agricultural systems. For this reason, we grow diverse groups of cover crops and create an ecosystem of sorts that feeds itself. On another note, establishing them in a pasture setting take a significant amount of time and money, at least in our part of MS. For us, for now, its just not practical in our system, but there are other ranchers I know who are having a lot of success grazing cows on native grasses.

[@threeriversforge1997]

@@DowdleFamilyFarms If it was easy, everyone would want to do it! 🤣 The problem I've found with native grasses is that they require a ton of rest. Folks will graze them like fescue or bermuda, not realizing that they're actually killing the stuff. When the cows graze it down to the crown, you've got to let it recover fully so those leaves can recharge the root. The roots are like a battery being charged by the solar panels, and the stored energy has to then go into building new solar panels after the cows destroyed the last set. Destroy those solar panels too many times, and the energy in the root battery gets depleted to the point that the plant simply doesn't have the energy to build again. Oddly, this is the same way they recommend killing off invasive bamboo. If you cut it down, the roots will send up new shoots every year that you have to cut down while they're still small. Keep doing that over and over and over, and within three years you'll have killed off the bamboo by simply exhausting its stored energy. The reason the native grasses worked for millennia is because the herbivore herds that grazed on them were kept moving by predator pressure and weather. The eaters were never on a patch long enough that they could eat everything down to the ground. Hard to do that in the modern setting.

[@DowdleFamilyFarms]

Rotational grazing can solve a lot of the issue with grazing natives with ruminants. That’s not hard it just takes some time. Still have the issue with mono gastric animals

[@briankubik5041]

I am trying to cover crops out this year I live in Michigan we will winter kill on everything mostly I was just wondering are to killing your crop yearly or do they continue into the next year is it important to redo it every year? Just looking for insight!

[@DowdleFamilyFarms]

Our summer cover crops winter kill if we don’t kill them first. Most of our cool season crops do not winter kill in Mississippi. However, between livestock and weather we usually kill the winter cover crops pretty well.

[@briankubik5041]

@@DowdleFamilyFarms are you replanting as broadcasting or tilling again? I know I seen some videos you talked about broadcasting ahead of the animals for them to self seed.. I just learned about frost seeding this past spring..