Grazing, Cover Crops, and Soil Health
Integrating cover crops into dryland crop production in the semiarid central Great Plains can provide several benefits. These include reduced soil erosion, improved nutrient cycling, suppression of herbicide resistant weeds, enhanced crop profitability and improved soil health. Despite these benefits and grower interest in using CC to improved soil health, cover crop adoption is slow and not widely popular in dryland (non-irrigated) systems because cover utilizes water that otherwise would be available to the subsequent cash crop. This Digital Cafe features Augustine Obour, Associate Professor of Soil Science at Kansas State University, who discusses Kansas State University’s research efforts using cover crops as forage to provide immediate economic benefits to farmers and quantifying the impacts of utilizing cover crops for forage on soil health and crop yields in semiarid dryland systems. This presentation was originally broadcast on Wednesday, June 21, 2023.