Cost of Cereal Rye and Vetch Cover Crop

Even though our winter cover crop of rye and vetch did not germinate well, I figured I’d go ahead and lay out its cost so we could compare it with the cost of our summer cover crop of sorghum sudan and cowpeas.  Below is the cost for drilling rye and vetch seed into about 22 acres of our neighbor’s fields (where we grew sorghum sudan and cowpeas) plus about 3 acres of our own former grass pasture.  We bought enough seed for 27 acres just in case we ran out.  We planted on Labor Day weekend 2011.    

Seeding rate:  Rye at 40 lbs per acre; Vetch at 20 lbs per acre. 

Seed Cost = $1,284.  (20 – 55 lb. bags of rye at $17.30 per bag, 11 – 50 lb. bags of vetch at $83 per bag, vetch inoculant = $25)

Mycorrhizal Inoculant = $388 (11 lbs)

Drill Rental = $200

Diesel = $22 (~ 5 gallons)

Labor = $160 (8 hours at $20 per hour)

Total = $2,054 or about $82 per acre (25 acres total) Sorghum sudan & cowpeas cost $70 per acre, but did not have mycorrhizal inoculant.

New Seed Supplier

Myco inoculant (top), vetch inoculant (right), cereal rye seed (bottom), vetch seed (left)

We bought the seed from Sam Swarey, a seed rep for Pennsylvania-based King’s Agri Seeds.  Mr. Swarey is Amish and lives close to us.  We’re glad we found a knowledgeable seed salesman that can supply us with just about any seed we’d like.  King’s Agri Seeds is focused on grazing and cover crops, which fits us well.  Even though we can’t pick up the phone and call Mr. Swarey, we’re glad we found him and his fantastic customer service.   

Vetch’s Low Price

The vetch seed cost would have been much more expensive, closer to $200 per bag, but Mr. Swarey had bags of last year’s vetch left over and sold them to us at cost.  Yay!

Vetch Inoculant

This inoculant is bacteria that forms nodules on vetch roots and fixes nitrogen from the air.  When the vetch dies (we’ll kill it next spring), the nitrogen will be released into the soil and made available for the next crop.  Very healthy soil might already have the bacteria, but since our soil is so lacking in organic matter and soil life, we thought it was wise to spend $25 and coat the seeds with it.

Mycorrhizal Fungi Inoculant

We bought this from AgVerra and mixed it with the seeds with a little milk before filling the seed drill.  Mycorrhizal fungi are amazing creatures.  They colonize plant roots and make the area around the roots acidic so nutrients like phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, zinc, etc will be attracted to the roots and will enter the plant for nourishment.  Cool, huh?  The fungi have a mutually beneficial relationship with plants because they help feed plants minerals, and the plants feed the fungi goodies made during photosysthesis.  These fungi are also responsible for making a soil component called glomalin.  As the fungi die, the glomalin is sloughed off into the soil.  We want more glomalin in our soil because it’s 40% carbon, and it gives the soil nice fluff and keeps stored soil carbon from escaping.  It’s tough stuff, and it’s exactly what our soil needs.  We decided to spend the money to repopulate our fields with these very beneficial fungi.  This should be a one-time cost.

Cost Comparison with Sorghum Sudan & Cowpeas

The Rye and Vetch cost was over $80 per acre, and the sorghum sudan and cowpeas cost was around $70 per acre.  The sorghum & cowpeas did not include the mycorrhizal inoculant, but we got a very good deal on the vetch price. With our poor rye and vetch germination, we estimate that half the seed did not germinate.  So, about $1,000 of this cover crop price was spent in vain.  We believe the cause of poor germination was the combination of planting into very fluffy soil right before a tropical storm dumped 10 inches of rain.  We learned our “grand” lesson and  for sure won’t make these mistakes again!

Growing Green Manure Crops – Practice on the Small Scale First

“Green manure” cover crops are grown and then plowed under, or incorporated, into the soil.  The green vegetation feeds soil critters, makes the soil nice and crumbly, and most of the roots become organic matter.  Green manure crops are a good, cheap fertilizer because 95% of the vegetation comes “free” from photosynthesis, and the 5% that contains minerals from the soil is returned to the soil, in even better plant form.  This post describes the benefits of practicing growing green manure crops on the small scale first… 

Rich made a good comment on my last blog post.  He grows small scale garden plots of green manure crops and takes note of their attributes, both good and bad.  After I read his comment, I realized this is the way to go.  Instead of spending hard-earned money on 25 acres’ worth of cover crop seed that I’ve never grown before (and risking crop failure), it’s wise to practice growing these crops on the small scale first.

My previous blog post explained our rotovator woes and our newbie farmer puzzlement over the poor germination of our rye & vetch winter cover crop.  In early September, I also planted some rye and vetch on the small scale – in our veggie garden beds.  Because these plants germinated wonderfully, I know the poor field germination is not the seed’s fault.  I’m also noticing different growth patterns of the rye and vetch that were planted at different dates– valuable info for how these two germinate and grow in our climate as winter approaches. 

Rye & vetch winter cover crop with dead buckwheat stems. Rye and vetch planted 9/9/11. Pic taken 11/20/11.

Rye and vetch’s interaction with buckwheat is another valuable piece of information I gained.  In the veggie beds this summer, as harvested produce left bare spots, I planted buckwheat to quickly cover the soil.  By mid-September, most of the veggie beds were full of buckwheat.  A lot of it had already made seed.  I decided to hoe it down into the topsoil so it could improve the soil’s texture and feed the critters.  I let the soil digest it for a couple of weeks, then planted rye and vetch.  Before the rye and vetch germinated, a lot of buckwheat from the hoed-in mature seeds started coming up.  I thought, “Ah oh, the buckwheat might out-compete the rye and vetch!”  This turned out to not be the case.  Check out the picture – the rye and vetch germinated with gusto, the buckwheat died quickly after frost, and the vetch started climbing up the buckwheat stems.  Yay, it worked!

So next year, I can use my buckwheat know-how to confidently plant it in the fields as a summer cover crop, then rotovate it into the soil, and then (after checking soil fluffiness) plant rye and vetch with no fear of it not germinating because of buckwheat competition.  Knock on wood, because this sounds like I’m setting myself up for another “lesson”!

Because we had trouble getting rye & vetch to germinate after rotovating sorghum sudan, I’m going to re-create this in a few veggie garden beds this summer and see what happens.  If the rye and vetch germinate just fine, I know it’s not the weed-killing attributes of sorghum sudan.  I can narrow the germination problem down to fluffy soil or the toad-strangler rains we got from Tropical Storm Lee. I also plan to practice growing other cover crops that look enticing to me, such as yellow blossom sweet clover and millets.  I’m looking forward to gaining this low-risk experience on the small scale next summer.  Thanks for reading!

Learning How to Rotovate a Green Manure Cover Crop

In mid-August we rotovated (shallow-tilled) our sorghum sudangrass and cowpea cover crop.  This post will describe the learning curve we encountered with our first time rotovating and how we got it to work.

Good mix of brown and green plant material

We planted this cover crop at the end of April, let it grow to about 5 feet tall, and mowed it in July.  Our bush hog made a lot of nice mulch.  After a week or so, the sorghum sudan and cowpeas came charging back mean and green and grew about 18 inches.  This is exactly what we wanted.  We wanted to rotovate green plant material “green manure” to feed and jumpstart soil life, and brown mulch material to breakdown and transform into organic matter.  These fields (our neighbor’s) were previously planted in no-till roundup-ready soybeans for at least a decade.  Organic matter is very low, below 2%.  Our goal is to stimulate all the soil critters to grow and multiply and bring life back to the fields.

our 7-foot rotovator

Rotovators are tillage tools, like a very wide garden tiller.  Our rotovator is 7 feet wide.  It has no wheels.  Instead, it skids along the ground like a sleigh, and the tractor’s 3-point hitch keeps it level.  We rotovated 25 acres of sorghum sudan and cowpeas (our neighbor’s fields) and two acres of our own grass fields.  In addition to the rotovator, our tractor was carrying a homemade spray tank on the front.  The spray tank is described here, and the spray mix (beneficial soil microbes and other goodies) is described here.

Why Rotovate?

We want to decrease the time it takes for the fields to get healthy.  Our own fields, which were previously under the same soybean farmer, have been in pasture grass for the past 3 years.  We’ve been mowing 2 or 3 times per year, fertilizing, and applying compost.  Unfortunately, we’ve seen very little improvement in the grass.   After studying biological farming techniques, we’re convinced the soil needs some disturbance to break up the sandy, crusty topsoil and to get a good dose of plant material and biology into the root zone.

Incorporating a green manure crop is essentially chopping plants and feeding them to the soil.  Five percent of a plant’s makeup comes from the soil (ash/minerals), and the remaining 95% comes “free” from photosynthesis of sunlight, water and air.  Incorporating the minerals (now in plant form) and all the free stuff like carbon, vitamins, and plant metabolites, provides a huge benefit to the soil in terms of improved soil structure and energized soil life.  We’re aiming for “chocolate cake” soil:  very dark, loose, and crumbly with high organic matter and a very healthy soil ecology.

Starting Out

Our goal was to rotovate as fast as possible (to decrease time in the tractor) and still be satisfied with the results.  In terms of results, we wanted to see most of the mulch incorporated into the top 4 inches of soil with a good mulch cover left on the surface for protection.  We also wanted to see a relatively smooth seedbed, but not so smooth that our sandy soil was pulverized.

We quickly discovered that getting our desired results would take a lot of trial and error!  On top of taking a large amount of time, rotovating includes many variables:  tractor speed, rpm, soil moisture, rotovator blade depth, vegetation content, row coverage (overlapping), and the position of the rotovator’s back gate.

Rotovating too slowly- powdery soil with little surface mulch

Lesson #1:  Don’t go too slowly.  On the first day, we started rotovating in our tractor’s 2^nd lowest gear at about 1900 rpm.  (The rotovator manual said 1900 was the max).  This is moving VERY slowly, about 2 mph.  2^nd gear cut the plants off at ground level but left them all on the soil surface.  The blades seemed to be bouncing a little instead of digging down.  Then we tried 1^st gear at 1900 rpm.  Going slower allowed the blades to get into the soil, but the rotovator now chopped the soil way too much and turned it into powder.  All of the vegetation was incorporated with hardly any protective mulch on top.  It was getting dark, and we hadn’t even finished two acres.  We decided to sleep on it and try again tomorrow.  That night, it started raining heavily.  I had nightmares recalling the old 1930s TVA movie clips showing drastic soil erosion!  I didn’t feel good about the soil turning to powder.  It felt like a giant step back, and I was worried.

Pile made by rotovator catching mulch from previous row and dragging it.

The next morning, we walked out to look at the fields.  No erosion at all, everything was fine.  Except now in the morning light, we could see all the big piles of soil and mulch the rotovator created.  One side of the rotovator kept catching on the mulch in the previous row and dragging it until it balled up big enough to discharge out the side.  It was discouraging because we didn’t want to bring our tractor back over those nice and fluffy rows to smooth out the piles.  The tractor is heavy and would compact the soil and remove all the air that microbes need when they’re working.  Looked like we’d be pitch forking them by hand!  (We did.)

Lesson #2:  Don’t rotovate bone-dry soil.  We waited a few days for the rains to stop and the soil to dry out.  We knew 1^st gear was bad, so we tried 2^nd gear again at a little lower rpm, 1800, and we also set the blade depth deeper.  Voila!  It worked!  Most of the mulch was getting incorporated with some left on top.  But the major lesson here was soil moisture.  After the rain, the moisture level was now just right.  The soil’s aggregates stayed together in nice, small clumps.  It was too dry on the first day, and that’s why it got pulverized so easily.

Uneven seedbed from rotovating in 3rd gear with gate up

Lesson #3:  Leave the back gate down if you need a smooth seedbed.  We were still making the big piles though, and we couldn’t figure it out.  We decided to go faster, in 3^rd gear, and lift the rotovator’s back gate up so all the mulch could leave without balling up.  This just helped make the piles a little smaller.  Also, keeping the back gate up left the soil surface very uneven.  That was another concern because we didn’t know how the drill (planter) would perform in a seedbed that bumpy.  We put the gate back down.

Lesson #4:  Don’t overlap rows.  It wasn’t too much longer when we discovered what was making the big piles.  I was bringing an iced tea out to my hubby in the tractor.  When he saw me to his far left, he turned his head and waved.  I saw the tractor and rotovator steer to the left far into the previously rotovated row, and a giant pile came out the side!  From then on, we concentrated hard on keeping the rotovator squarely on unrotovated ground.  This was hard to do continuously, but it worked!  We ended up leaving very narrow strips of the cover crop standing just so we’d avoid the piles.  This didn’t look very good, but we’re fine with it because the sorghum sudangrass and cowpeas will both die at frost.

Just right - moist soil, most of plant incorporated with plenty of protective mulch left on top

Lesson #5:  Do lots of test runs on the day you’re rotovating.  We ended up going back down to 2^nd gear at 1800 rpm for most of the job.  The cover crop was very lush and thick in some places, and we needed a slower speed for most of it to get incorporated.  However, when we rotovated our 2 acres of pasture grass, we could go back up to 3^rd gear.  The density of the vegetation makes a difference.

With all the variables involved, it’s key to test before you start to find the happy medium for that day.  Make sure your soil has some moisture (but not anywhere near wet) and start testing to see what speed and rpm gets most of the plant material below the surface and still leaves a protective mulch cover on top.   And if you start creating big piles, stop overlapping the rows!

Hurricane Irene Side Note:  Irene came two weeks later with 85 mph winds and 10 inches of rain.  The next morning, there was surprisingly little water standing and no sign of erosion.  The large quantity of mulch, both below and above the surface, protected the soil well.

Adding Biology to Our Soil with AgVerra and Tainio Products

Tractor with 3-point hitch rotovator and front-mounted spray tank on forklift attachment

We sprayed biology (beneficial microbes), enzymes, microbe stimulants, and molasses onto our sorghum sudangrass and cowpeas cover crop just before we rotovated it into the soil.  Our rotovating is described here, and our home made spray tank and molasses adventure is described here.  Our soil has very low organic matter and is lacking in earthworms and other signs of soil life.  Because we were already going to the trouble of rotovating, we applied beneficial biology while we were at it.  Our goals are to help the cover crop residue break down quickly so we could plant our winter cover crop soon and also to get good microbes into the soil so the soil can start coming back to life and creating organic matter.

Good residue breakdown with Tainio products in topsoil. 3 weeks after rotovating. Neighbor's east field - 1.9% organic matter, 6.6 pH, 5.6 CEC

We attended a fantastic farm meeting at Keystone Bio Ag near Lancaster, PA this summer.  They were selling many Tainio products, and we purchased Spectrum, a mix of beneficial microbes and Pepzyme Clear, an enzyme product that stimulates microbe reproduction.  The cost for enough to cover 10 acres was $240.   We were also in contact with AgVerra, a company I found through Acres USA.  They offered to include us as one of their project farms.  In return for feedback on their products, we got 50% off.  Whatta deal!  They sent us 20 acres worth of their Stubble Digester product, a mix of microbes that are especially good at breaking down plant residue quickly, and PTM,  a mix of beneficial soil microbes plus goodies like kelp extract, fulvic acid, and plant growth regulators.  The cost for 20 acres worth was $280 (half off) or $14 per acre.

Besides having a hard time keeping our farm cat away from the Spectrum because it smelled like fishy cat food and also curbing my hunger because the Stubble Digester reminded me of crushed oreos, all products were very easy to work with and get into the spray tank.  All products dissolved really well in the tank.

The AgVerra products offered better visibility coming out of the spray tank.  Their Stubble Digester and PTM are jet-black in color and ended up giving the spray mix a slight oily (not greasy) consistency.  This allowed us to see the spray mix cling to the leaves.  It reminded us of vinaigrette dressing!   This is not a huge benefit, but as newbie farmers, it felt good to actually see the product landing where we wanted it, and it helped us verify that our spray tank was working.

We did not speak directly to the Tainio company, but Keystone Bio Ag had good customer service and pointers in using the products.  AgVerra also had excellent customer service – they have nice product information online, and Alfred went above and beyond to help with product selection, suggestions on our home made spray tank, etc.

Good breakdown with AgVerra products, 2.5 weeks after rotovating. Neighbor's west field - 1.5% organic matter, 5.9 pH, 5.0 CEC

We started first with the Tainio products on our neighbor’s east field, which is their best field in terms of soil tilth, organic matter and mineral content.  The soil in this field is much easier to shovel than their other fields.  AgVerra’s products went on our neighbor’s remaining lower-quality fields and on the 2-acre slice of our pasture.  We took these pictures this morning, 2.5 to 3 weeks after rotovating and 6 days after Hurricane Irene’s 10 inches of rain.  Both products seem to be working really well.  The residue has broken down so nicely that we could plant our winter cover crop now, except the soil is too wet for heavy equipment.

I’m excited to see what our winter cover crop looks like this fall and next spring.  Maybe I’ll discern a difference in the two lines of products at that time, although the soil quality difference between the fields might explain any distinction.  We’ll see!

Building a Front-Mounted Boom Sprayer for Your Tractor

This post describes how we built our front mounted boom sprayer and how we adapted to get the job done after making some big mistakes.

Tractor with 3-point hitch rotovator and front-mounted spray tank on forklift attachment

We equipped our tractor with a front mounted boom sprayer to help get biology into our worn-out soil.  We wanted to apply beneficial microbes to our cover crop just before we rotovated (shallow-tilled) it back into the soil.  A tractor with equipment mounted in both the front and back accomplishes two operations in one.  We can spray in the front and rotovate in back (reminds me of the famous mullet hairstyle joke!), all in one pass across the fields.  This saves lots of time and soil compaction.

We were initially willing to purchase a front mounted boom sprayer, but we had an extra hard time finding one!  We looked at the specialized sprayers for orchards, but they were very expensive, and most of the tank capacities were less than 50 gallons.   We also saw front mounted sprayers for huge tractors, but there was no way our tractor could handle a 500-gallon tank.  We were hoping for a tank capacity around 100 gallons.   We saw plenty of 3 point hitch (for the back of the tractor) boom sprayers, but they were expensive too, and we’d end up taking off the 3 point attachments anyway.   

So we had an idea:  our tractor already has a fork lift attachment, so why not strap the tank onto that?  We bought parts – 100-gallon tank ($250), agricultural 1 gallon per minute spray pump ($80), and a boom with nozzles ($180).  We already had other materials:  electrical wire to run the pump switch into the tractor’s cigarette lighter, tie-down straps, flexible water tubing to connect the tank to the boom, etc.  This worked like a champ with water, and we were excited to get going.

Front-mounted spray tank - first design with spray pump connected to boom

The problem came with molasses.  We wanted to add some kind of sugar with the microbes to the tank.  Sugar wakes up the microbes and gets them going.  Molasses is highly recommended because it’s sweet and contains minerals.  What we would give to go back in time and pay more for liquid molasses instead of dry molasses!  Dry molasses is much cheaper ($18 per 50 pound bag), and it’s easy to get at farming supply stores.  It’s an animal feed, and this animal liked it!  It smelled really good and tasted like raisin bran.  We wanted to spray at least 5 pounds of sugar per acre, and the bag said dry molasses had 38% sugar.  We did a test rotovating run and determined each tank would cover just under 2 acres, so we added half a bag (25 pounds) to the tank with the recommended rate of microbes and filled up the tank with water. 

Well, the sprayer nozzles clogged within 5 minutes!  In our studying of the dry molasses bag to find the sugar content, we somehow missed the words in big font that said “22% FIBER”.  Once it was soaked in water, the residue was like oatmeal.  The nozzles couldn’t handle it, and the spray pump also clogged after we took the nozzles off and tried to just pump the mix out through the lines.

We were frustrated!  We were in a good weather window, and lots of rain was predicted to start in the next few days.  We started steeping the molasses in 5 gallon buckets and filtering it through a kitchen colander.  Took forever! 

Second design- note new flexible piping, valve, and pvc on top of tank

We couldn’t take the spray pump completely apart to clean it, so we opted for another route.  We weighed down a sump pump at the bottom of the tank and connected it to a ¾ inch diameter pvc pipe with holes drilled in it.  Since the sump pump put out way more than a gallon per minute, we put a valve in between the pump and the pvc pipe and partially closed it.  More liquid was coming out of the holes closest to the pump, so we wrapped tape around the pvc to partially cover those holes.  The liquid was now coming out pretty evenly along the whole length of the pipe.

Out in the field, the streams coming out of the pvc pipe worked just fine.  Not every leaf got coated, but since microbes multiply, this is probably not a big deal.   

In summary, the molasses fiber mistake cost us about $260.  We can use the boom, but the spray pump is probably a goner.  We will probably get another spray pump and hook it up to the boom for future use, such as spraying foliar fertilizers where we want a fine spray.  But for getting microbes and sugar into the soil, the cheap sump pump and pvc pipe was good enough.  We intend to keep learning – we imagine we need some sort of filter and agitator inside the pump, and we probably need different nozzles.  Unfortunately, we again learned the lesson to not trust the “agricultural” label, such as agricultural nozzles.  These are used to mainly spray pesticides and herbicides (clear liquids), and we’re not in that line of business, so we need completely different components. 

Grass ♥ Poop

We were on the road a lot this past winter driving to area horse barns and hauling their stall clean-outs back to our farm.  Every time we headed out, we came back to the farm and plopped a huge pile of pee-soaked sawdust, wood shavings, and manure on our land.  And we got this stuff for free!  The piles broke down over the winter into deep, black, sweet-smelling compost.  We’re spreading the piles now, and I imagine our burned-out soil is getting drunk off this stuff!  

But I’m still thinking about the spring equinox on March 20^th.  I had heard that grass starts to “wake up” right around then, so yearning for a sign of spring, I took a pasture walk to go see.  I came upon the compost piles and every one of them had a wide ring of dark green grass around them!  I ran back to the house to get the camera.  As you can see in the picture below, compared to the rest of the grass in the field, the grass in the ring is darker, thicker, and taller.  Even better, most of last year’s dead grass has melted away.  We were REALLY excited about this because it was such a change from last year when we watched the grass barely survive competition from superweeds in inhospitable compacted dusty soil.  This goes to show what compost can do for burned-out soil and starving grass.   

ring around the compost 3/20/2010

So what exactly caused this bloom of health?  It’s not moisture because the not-so-great-looking grass received the same amount.  It’s not organic matter, because the compost hasn’t worked into the ring’s soil yet.  I think it’s the bugs.  Compost is alive with bugs of all sizes, and it’s probably the smallest bugs – microbes –  that are responsible for the dark ring of healthy grass.  Microbes are soil’s great recyclers.  They take nutrients such as carbon (C) and recycle them into available forms that plants can use.  This could explain why the carbonaceous dead grass from last year is disappearing in the healthy ring.  Maybe microbes are recycling it into nutrients that the grass can use.  And this grass definitely needs nutrients!   

So grass obviously loves poop.  And I think poop definitely loves grass back.  Microbes want a place to thrive—to live (‘n eat) in the soil community and help grass grow.  Grass flourishes with the added nutrients and supports the microbes in return with its healthy root systems.  Microbes and grass are in a very loving relationship, just in time for some spring fever.

This post is part of Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday.