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Radish a good marker of soil health

A cover crop seed salesman in Minnesota calls the tillage radish a good marker of soil health.

TJ Kartes with Saddle Butte Ag tells Brownfield the tuber-style brassicas provide a unique way of seeing what’s happening underground.

“When it hits a hard-pan layer, it kinks a little bit and then goes down again.  So what we saw in 2013 when we did a lot of research when our preventative plant year was going on…we’d dig these radishes and go down about 2 1/2 to 3 inches and see the first kink.  And the guy I was working with at the time out of Indiana really schooled us well on what we were seeing.  He said what we’re seeing is the cultivator hard-pan.”

He says they went down another six to eight inches and the radish kinked again, signifying the plow pan.

“So when your roots go down on your corn plant, when it hits each one of those hard-pans they’ve got to go sideways until they find a channel to go down again.  The whole time they’re growing sideways, they’re not going down to get moisture and nutrients out of the deeper profile of the soil.”

Kartes says radishes also help identify heavy metals in the soil by showing discoloration.

Tillage radish has become one of the more popular cover crop species because its large taproot penetrates compacted soil layers to increase soil aeration and water infiltration.