Mackane Vogel here, with this week’s cover crop connection. The 2024 National Cover Crop Summit takes place online from March 12 to 14 and features a stacked lineup of 7 different sessions on all things cover crops. Check out this preview of Missouri agronomist Rob Myers’ presentation on cover crops and how they should be managed during a drought vs. during an especially wet season.

“We've got data now from thousands of farms in the wet year of 2019 how cover crops impacted that situation so I'm going to share some data and some farmer experience and some insights on how cover crops can impact our soil moisture in a lot of different situations and of course we do need to be careful how we manage the cover crop to avoid over drying the soil in a dry spring so I'll talk a little bit about that as well And then I'll touch on this practice of planting green which is increasingly being used where the farmers are allowing that cover crop to grow longer in the spring planting their cash crop into a still living cover crop and what kind of implications that has for soil moisture and how the cover crop should be managed. And I'll finish up with a little information on cover crop grazing and other approaches to improve overall resiliency so hope you'll have a chance to join us for that”

Lots of good info in Rob’s presentation that could be valuable for this year’s growing season. The Summit also features Jim Hoorman, Matt Burkholder, Michael Vittetoe, Rob Dowdle, Erin Silva, Andrew McGuire, Macauley Kincaid and James Hepp. It’s going to be a great event that you don’t want to miss so head to covercropsummit.com to sign up for free. That’s all for this week’s cover crop connection.