2018
Plant Early Kill Late – Extend the Green to Get More from Cover Crops
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Contributor/Checkoff:
Maryland Soybean Board
Category:
Sustainable Production
Keywords:
Field management Nutrient managementSoil healthTillageYield trials
Parent Project:
Plant Early Kill Late – Extend the Green to Get More from Cover Crops
Lead Principal Investigator:
Raymond Weil, University of Maryland
Co-Principal Investigators:
Project Code:
Contributing Organization (Checkoff):
Maryland Soybean Board
$23,459
Institution Funded:
University of Maryland
$23,459
Brief Project Summary:

The overall aim of this research is to provide information that may help change the mindset about cover crop management just doing the minimum to qualify for payments to managing for maximum cover crop benefits for soil health and profitability. The objectives intend to document the benefits and/or problems of planting earlier and killing later, and develop and test strategies and technologies for establishing cover crops earlier, including airplane seeding, early maturing crop cultivars, and inter-seeding with ground equipment and letting them grow longer in spring, including planting green. Potential benefits include greater nutrient cycling, better weed suppression, more effective water-conserving and increased soil organic matter and biological activity.

Key Benefactors:
farmers, agronomists, Extension agents, NGOs

Information And Results
Project Deliverables

Presentation to the American Society of Agronomy conference in November 2018.

Final Project Results

Update:
On the sites with a larger cover crop, corn yields were higher, the soil was better protected, and soil moisture was higher. Soil moisture was substantially higher on the treatments where the cover crop was killed late. The yields on the loamy sand where the cover crop was killed early were significantly lower than the yields for the late killed cover crop, but not on silt loam soils.

The soybean experiment at Beltsville provided important insight for cover crop interseeding in winter 2018. Fall 2018 had very high rainfall, which provided good conditions for interseeded cover crops, but poor conditions for drilling a cover crop. Under these conditions, the differences between treatments were dramatic. Results indicate that it is possible to interseed a cover crop too early in the year and that planting in October after harvest resulted in substantially lower cover crop biomass than interseeding prior to harvest. Earliest interseeding results showed that there was an ideal planting window likely between the 8/24 and 9/22 dates, when soybean leaves are all yellow, but before they begin dropping. As of March 2019, biomass was harvested from field sites at Beltsville and the Eastern Shore, but the kill date treatments had not yet been applied. Research in 2019 includes harvesting cover crop biomass from each treatment in the first week of April 2019, followed by herbicide application on early killed treatments and harvesting from late killed treatments in the first week of May 2019, followed by herbicide treatment and corn planting.

View uploaded report Word file

The United Soybean Research Retention policy will display final reports with the project once completed but working files will be purged after three years. And financial information after seven years. All pertinent information is in the final report or if you want more information, please contact the project lead at your state soybean organization or principal investigator listed on the project.