Planting Cover Crops Before Anyone Knew What a Cover Crop Was

Well, this week we kicked off the 6th annual National Cover Crop Summit which featured more than half a dozen presentations from a variety of great speakers covering several different cover crop related topics. But if you missed out on the sessions, we’ve got you covered. You can still sign up to gain access to all of this year’s sessions as well as more than 40 sessions from past years — and you’ll have an entire year to view them at your convenience. Here’s just one clip of a session from this year. Check out father-son farming duo Roger & Nick Wenning as they explain how they started planting cover crops before they even knew what a cover crop was. 

“I actually started back, I guess in the mid ‘80s. I didn’t know it was cover crops because we didn’t know what a cover crop was. But I have a lot of rolling ground and I got tired of watching my soil wash down into the creek. So I started contour planting weed around them and up and down all the little gullies, using them for erosion control — worked beautifully. Well, then I started noticing, we tried no-tilling in it then too and there were a few guys in the county no-tilling. Cover crops, nobody had heard of so we were on our own there. But I had a couple guys to talk to and we worked on some no-tilling and even early on I noticed that the ground was a little more mellow — we could get a stand. Because otherwise those hills over the years had eroded and you worked it and just had clods about 2 inches — you’d drop your corn in and wait for rain and hope maybe some of it would come up. But we just noticed the ground was more mellow.” 

A fascinating cover crop origin story there from the Wennings. And that’s just one snippet of one presentation, so be sure to go to cover crop summit dot com to sign up for the Summit and hear the rest of their story as well as several other fascinating lessons, anecdotes, research summaries and more in the world of cover crops. Well that’s all for this week’s cover crop connection.