Cover Crops Part 2: Recycling Your Nutrient Dollars

Field Work

Society & Culture, Documentary

5.0 • 652 Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2019

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cover crops blanket the soil from the time you harvest one crop until you plant the next. And there’s a long list of benefits they provide: they can replenish soil in between planting, prevent soil erosion, slow water down, pull moisture deeper into the soil, and increase soil organic matter over time. For Doug Adams, an Iowa farmer and soil conservation technician at USDA-NRCS, cover crops also provide a way to recycle his nutrient dollars. In this episode, he tells Zach and Mitchell about how much he hates seeing valuable fertilizer leak out of his system, as it’s never coming back. “If I can get a good cover crop established,” he says, “it will help sequester some of those nitrates and other fertilizer and keep it from getting flushed out of my system.” Also in this episode: Mitchell explains what it means to “keep it squatchy,” and Zach weighs in on how to speak Minnesotan to earthworms.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey guys, Zach here, and I wanted to let you guys know that field work is brought to you in part by General Mills.
0:08.0	General Mills is partnering with farmers and suppliers to advance regenerative ag practices on a million acres of the field work podcast.
0:29.6	I'm Zach Johnson and I'm sitting across from a degenerate.
0:35.6	That's as creative as I could get.
0:39.1	Straight to degenerate.
0:40.4	The way it was like going from,
0:42.4	we have a really professional podcast here going on to,
0:45.2	nope, this is, no, degenerates who have bendy microphones.
0:50.7	Somebody gave us a studio.
0:52.6	And now we're going to talk about cover crops.
0:54.3	That's right.
0:54.9	Yeah, well, now I'm all sweaty again.
0:57.1	So let's get into the cover crop issue here now that we've made it uncomfortable.
1:00.4	Well, we'll see where we can go.
1:03.3	I'm sure it'll continue to be uncomfortable.
1:05.8	And we're going to keep on learning.
1:07.1	Besides a degenerate, who exactly am I sitting across from? Okay, so besides a degenerate, my name is Mitchell Hora, and I'm a farmer from Iowa.
1:14.5	All right, so this is our next little episode that we're doing on cover crops.
1:18.6	Again, cover crops are a complicated subject.
1:22.1	They're not cut and dry.
1:23.5	Not always a simple thing.
1:24.9	There's a lot of different things you can do with cover crops, different things you want to achieve. And so we're going to talk about that.
	...

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