Cereal rye cover crop rolling/crimping in late March 2011 at Brock Farm in Monticello, Florida. Custom roller/crimper design and fabrication by Kirk Brock.
While decision making in agriculture involves many aspects beyond climate, including economics, social factors, and policy considerations, climate-related risks are a primary source of yield and income variability. A new UF/IFAS 4-page fact sheet focuses on the use of high-biomass winter cover crops to improve production systems. Written by Joel Love, Jed Dillard, Kirk Brock, Daniel Dourte, and Clyde Fraisse, and published by the UF Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, August 2012.
This figure illustrates that the increased infiltration of rainfall (less runoff) is a result of both no tillage and residue cover. NT indicates no tillage; CT indicates conventional tillage. The symbols + and – R mean with or without plant residues. In this experiment in Alabama, black oat residues were removed from one of the NT treatments and added to one of the CT treatments. The results were much less runoff under NT compared to CT, and even less runoff for the added residue treatments. These results suggest that no tillage with high-residue cover crops provide optimum rainfall runoff reduction (data from Truman, Shaw, and Reeves 2005).
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