Sometimes first impressions are all wrong. Anyone driving Highway 80 in Iowa County this past spring might be forgiven for thinking "ugly" while driving past one of Tom Novak’s cover cropped fields earlier this spring. "It looked like a big mess", Tom Novak recalled.
But on December 16th Tom received a call from the Wisconsin Soybean Extension Program telling him that he'd won the "planting green" category of the 2024 Wisconsin Soybean Yield Contest with his entry of 85.22 bushels per acre with LG Seeds LGS2054XF.
"It was a 6-acre field that I'd planted green with a big 2023 cover crop of oats, Sudan grass, radishes, turnips, and winter peas," Tom explained. That field had been insulated over the winter by snow such that the radishes and turnips, which had tubers underground as reserves, withstood his spring herbicide and grew tall flowers in the spring.
Tom is an active farmer participant in the Uplands Watershed Group, as well as a collaborator in Michael Field's Agricultural Institute's project the Wisconsin Cover Crop Data Network.
Tom explained that despite the vigorous growth and flowering of the cover crops, "I knew I had a good stand of soybeans under there." He entered the field in the Wisconsin Soybean Yield Contest and with spring and early summer rains, the cover crops died back and the soybeans took over and looked tremendous.
Soil erosion in hilly Iowa County is a big problem, and Tom relies on cover crops to help him with water infiltration and erosion control. So, even if they are occasionally a little wild looking, in 2024, cover crops helped keep the soil in place and protected during the heavy rains in the spring and during the dry months later in the year.
Learn more about how farmers are bucking ideas of what a tidy field "should" look like in favor of strong, protected soils at michaelfields.org/covercrops.
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