Weed suppressive cover crop incorporation in organic corn educational plot (New)

Allen Deutz

As an regenerative organic grower, one of the biggest problems I experience is the prevalence of grassy weeds in my corn acres. While I have experimented with various means of controlling these weeds, I have never had an acceptable level of success given the overall number of effective OMRI-certified herbicides and their general increased cost. Additionally, each year my stock cows graze corn stalks in the fall after harvest. For nutritional purposes, hay is used to balance out their daily intake. The use of hay requires additional planning as well as costs, reducing the profitability of the practice. To mitigate both of these issues, we plan to use a diverse cover crop applied during the last cultivation pass to incorporate the cover crop into the soil, providing weed suppression, as well increasing the nutritional value of the late season corn stalk grazing for the cattle.

This project is also going to be conducted in conjunction with, and serve as a research/educational plot for the SMSU Agronomy department. Per the SMSU Agronomy collaborator (Dr. Adam Alford), the SMSU research plots received 50-75 unique student visitors in the 2022-2023 funding cycle which represents ~1/20th of the full time SMSU undergraduate student body. This student turnout demonstrates that the SMSU research plots (and by extension, the organic field located directly north of the SMSU research plots used in this study) can be used to help augment/enhance student learning for ag focused students, and at the least, help introduce non-ag students to agriculture. As an SMSU alumni who invited several students to my farm during my undergraduate, I’ve seen how this brief introduction for non-ag students may be superficial at first, but it can help lead to a greater understanding of what types of jobs are involved in modern farming.