2025 Soil Health and Cover Crop Workshop

Farmers, industry and agency stakeholders, administrators, students, and faculty gathered in Live Oak, FL  at the UF/IFAS North Florida Research And Education Center, on February 13 to attend the Annual Soil Health and Cover Crop Training Workshop. Despite the rainy weather, the event attracted 109 participants. The objective of this workshop is to demonstrate innovative practices that support soil health principles, including minimize soil disturbance (reduce tillage), maximize the presence of living roots in the soil and keep the soil covered (plant cover crops), maximize biodiversity and integrate livestock to recycle nutrients (rotate with animals, apply manure-based amendments). Horticultural Sciences faculty member Danielle Treadwell has been a member of the planning committee for each event. This year’s event, led by Jay Capasso is the fifth and largest event hosted by the planning committee since 2019. To date, 304 total attendees have participated in this workshop series designed for the North Central Florida farm community.

The one-day workshop began with a welcome by UF/IFAS NFREC Director, Dean Pringle, and featured a trolley tour with several field stops at ongoing projects. The first stop featured a soil pit presentation by farmer Kirk Brock (Brock Farms), so farmers could see the impact of management on soil physical, chemical and biological properties. The soil pit site was the location of a 2024 BMP-focused grain corn variety trial followed by two seasons of cover crops. After corn harvest, a summer cover crop mixture of sun hemp, sunflower, and buckwheat was seeded with a no-till drill. After frost terminated the summer cover crops, a winter cover crop of cereal rye was seeded with a no-till drill. Participants viewed living rye roots to a depth of three feet and the accumulation of organic matter in the upper soil horizons.

At the next stop, UF/IFAS soil scientist Jehangir Bhadha along with a team of graduate students and postdoctoral researcher presented several soil health benefits of cover cropping. In addition to discussing the four basic soil health principles (i.e., maximizing soil cover, biodiversity and continuous living roots, and minimizing soil disturbance), the team also demonstrated the importance of organic matter and soil pH as key indicators of soil quality across different soil types within the State.

Horticultural Sciences faculty members D. Treadwell and P. Dittmar shared early results from a USDA-funded project led by Gabriel Maltais-Landry, Associate Professor, (Department of Soil, Water, and Ecosystem Sciences). They were joined by farmer Logan Petrey (Grimmway Farms). The team talked about the risks and benefits of traditional versus regenerative management strategies for growing grain corn, carrots, and fresh peanuts on both certified organic and conventionally managed land.

Regenerative management includes practices that support the natural biological and ecological processes on the farm to build and/or maintain soil health. Regenerative research plots had less tillage, more organic amendments, and more cover crops compared to traditional management plots. A big challenge to improving soil health in organic systems is the need for mechanical weed cultivation due to the lack of effective and allowable herbicides. The presenters discussed how cultivation equipment choice and timing are critical for effective weed control in organic systems. They also explained that herbicide use in traditional systems was effective but reduces weed diversity and might lead to herbicide-resistant weeds if not managed carefully.

The presenters noted that adding organic fertilizers in regenerative systems often caused differences in how quickly crops grew early in the season compared to traditional management. This is because the nitrogen from organic amendments needs to be changed by soil microbes into a form that plants can use. If the weather or soil conditions are not ideal for these microbes, nitrogen availability can be delayed. Based on preliminary results from the first year of the study in Live Oak and Citra, regenerative strategies often resulted in increased yields of grain corn, carrot and peanut in organic systems compared to traditional organic strategies receiving more tillage, while yield differences between regenerative and traditional conventional management were variable by crop and study location.

After a hot lunch sponsored by industry partners and catered by Fifth Generation Farms, soil health and plant materials specialists from the Natural Resource Conservation Service demonstrated how reduced tillage can help protect water quality and increase the soil’s ability to hold moisture by passing water through different sections of soil removed from production fields.

They collected clear water that had passed through soil planted with a cover crop of winter rye from reduced tillage systems. In contrast, the water from a section of soil and cover crop from farmland under frequent tillage was muddy. Also, much more water passed through the frequently tilled soil than the reduced tillage soil. Members of the sod-based rotation team, including J. Capasso and Shivendra Kumar (NFREC-SV) presented soil quality improvement data from a Bahia grass-livestock-crop rotation, illustrating the beneficial roles of living plant roots and organic amendments to improved soil health.

Based on evaluation responses from participants, 64% of respondents were relatively new to soil health practices; 44% reported they had been using practices that promote soil health for less than five years, and 20% reported they had been using practices for less than ten years. Participants reported working (as farmers, service providers, and educators) with a wide variety of commodities, including vegetables, row crops, hay, sod, timber, blueberries, dairy cattle, and sheep.

The principles of soil health are shared by all, even if implementing soil health practices is different for every farm and every commodity. Soil health is monitored by measuring soil characteristics over time, but it is not defined by a fixed set of criteria. In other words, there is no real “finish line”. Instead, farmers are encouraged to document a starting point and celebrate small improvements over time that contribute to the farm’s resilience and viability. UF/IFAS researchers and farm collaborators are working to identify the management practices that have the best return on investment for our industry.

Authors:

D. Treadwell, J. Capasso, J. Love, P. Dittmar

Danielle Treadwell, Associate Professor and State Extension Specialist, Organic and Sustainable Specialty Crop Production, UF/IFAS Horticultural Sciences Dept., Gainesville, FL.

Email: ddtreadw@ufl.edu

Joel Love, BMP Outreach and Education Coordinator, UF/IFAS North Florida Research and Education Center-Suwannee Valley, Live Oak, FL.

Email: jclove@ufl.edu

Jay Capasso, Regional Specialized Agent, Water Resources, UF/IFAS North Florida Research and Education Center-Suwannee Valley, Live Oak, FL.

Email: jcapasso@ufl.edu

Peter Dittmar, Associate Professor and State Extension Specialist, Weed Science, UF/IFAS Horticultural Sciences Dept., Gainesville, FL.

Email: pdittmar@ufl.edu

Jehangir Bhadha, Associate Professor and State Extension Specialist, Integrated Soil, Water, & Nutrient Management, UF/IFAS Everglades Research and Education Center, Belle Glade, FL.

Email: jango@ufl.edu

0