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Cover crops make sense for cattle producers

Sarah Carlson with Practical Farmers of Iowa says all row-crop farmers who raise cattle should use cover crops.

“There’s multiple places where cover crops and cattle just make so much sense.  For example, in the fall you fly on a cover crop into standing corn.  You harvest that corn and have the green material out there with those corn stalks.  That green material is really lush, so it’s going to help that cow eat even more corn stalks.”

Carlson has been studying cover crops since 2008 and says corn stalks are full of carbon and the green lush nitrogen-rich cover crop helps cattle digest and eat more stalks, therefore saving on hay costs.

She tells Brownfield the cow processes all the carbon, which leads to more benefits.

“It deposits its manure, so the end credits that you could take going back to corn (like corn following corn) you could be able to reduce nitrogen and not take the yield hit we see in corn on corn because the cow would’ve processed all that carbon.”

She says fall grazing of cover crops should be a no-brainer for cattle producers, and there are ways to work around some of the challenges of spring grazing, like compaction from the cows.

Carlson will be part of a soil health workshop put on by the Land and Stewardship Project next Thursday near Lewiston in southeast Minnesota.