Are Cover Crops Right for Your Farm?



If you’ve been considering cover crops or wondering if they could be beneficial on your farm, there’s a trial you can sign up to participate in now that could give you valuable experience and knowledge. The Infield Advantage Program is a collaborative program made possible through a partnership between the Indiana Soybean Alliance, Indiana Corn Marketing Council, the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, and Truterra.
The goal of the program, according to Purdue soil scientist and conservation agronomist Joe Rorick, who works in partnership with the corn and soybean checkoffs, is, “Getting cover crop seed to farmers, being able to do some soil health testing, doing some cover crop biomass measurements, helping growers to figure out how cover crops can work on their farms while still helping them manage some of that risk as well.”
He says for the trial, you need to register a single 40–80-acre field, and then, “There are some basic cover crop mixes that we’ve put together that, depending on your crop rotation in the field you want to enroll in the program, you would get one of those mixes to plant on half of that field. That’s a split field program, half with and half without cover crops so you can kind of see some of the differences.”
To learn more or to register, Rorick encourages you to visit infieldadvantage.org.
“On there you can click through what the trial entails, register there, you’ll sign a form that says, ‘Yeah, I’m interested in the program.’ The state department of ag will get a hold of you to get some more information from you and get the program running.”
Rorick discusses this and much more in the latest HAT Soil Health Podcast presented by the Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative below.

 

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