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Late blight is a serious plant disease that affects potato and tomato. It can completely destroy crops in as little as two weeks when conditions are favorable for the pathogen. Phytophthora infestans, the organism that causes late blight, is known as a water mold, which gives us a hint that late blight is favored by high humidity and wet leaves. When relative humidity levels exceed 90%, hundreds of thousands of spores are produced on infected plants, which can be carried by air currents to infect nearby fields and gardens. Late blight epidemics can develop and spread very quickly.

One of the first places to scout for late blight is in seed potatoes before planting. Look for sunken, dark lesions on the surface of the tubers. If these lesions are caused by late blight, a shallow cut across the surface of the lesion will reveal a dry, firm, reddish-brown rot. Often, other diseases will invade late blight infected tubers, making it difficult to determine if late blight is present. Submit suspect tubers to your state diagnostic lab and avoid planting seed that appears to be infected. (Find your state diagnostic lab at the National Plant Diagnostic Network: www.npdn.org)

Other places for early season scouting include piles of culled potatoes, potatoes surviving in compost piles, or volunteer potato plants growing from tubers left in the ground the prior season–especially if late blight was present in your area. Cull and volunteer potatoes should be destroyed before green tissue emerges if possible, or scouted for symptoms if it’s not possible to destroy them. When buying tomato transplants, be sure they appear healthy, with no dark spots on the leaves or stem.

When you're scouting a field, it is important to think about where you’re most likely to find early symptoms. The first symptoms are often found where environmental conditions are most favorable for infection–such as low spots and edges near woods where plants tend to stay wet longer. Also think about places in the field where an organic-approved fungicide application may have skipped, like this spot where an aerial application missed near a power line. (Note: If prohibited fungicides were applied the previous year, then the field cannot be used for organic production in the current year. Consult with your certifier/inspector before using any product or input in your certified organic operation, and read the article, Can I Use This Input on My Organic Farm?)

In this field, late blight was first found near the woods, where plants are shaded in the morning, and there is less air movement. Adding to the wet, humid conditions that favor late blight, the irrigation system was leaking at this corner of the field, so the soil was saturated, increasing the relative humidity even more.

Because seed can be the source of disease inoculum in potatoes, the first sign of late blight may be a lesion on the stem that got its start from the infected tuber, and it could occur anywhere in the field. In this case it would make sense to focus early season scouting on the stem and base of the plant.

Inside dense plant canopies is another place late blight might first appear. When scouting, always look inside the canopy where leaves stay wet and relative humidity stays high later in the day. Be sure to scout the bottom of the plant canopy where leaves dry off more slowly. Staking tomatoes can help keep leaves dry, but if plants are very healthy, humidity can stay high inside the dense canopy.

Late blight lesions on leaves tend to have rounded edges, often with a lighter border. The lesions go right across the leaf veins. Tissue in the center of the lesion may be completely dead, and may appear wet and slimy. The pathogen will produce fragile, white growth in the living tissue surrounding the lesion if relative humidity is high. This is where thousands of spores are produced, which can detach from the plant and be carried for miles on air currents. If relative humidity is low, sporulation will not be present. Very new late blight lesions resemble early signs of several other diseases, and suspect leaves should be brought in from the field and held in a plastic bag with a damp paper towel to allow symptoms and spores to develop.

Late blight affects all parts of the plant. On potato and tomato stems, lesions are black, with a greasy appearance. Sporulation often appears on stem lesions rather than at the border as it does on leaves. On tomato fruit, late blight appears as a firm, brown lesion, and spores may also be produced on the lesion itself.

We hope this introduction to scouting for late blight will help you detect infections on your farm as early as possible. Finding it early gives you the best shot at successful management.
 

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT. 

Disease Suppression

We’re seeing disease suppression, which is something we don’t entirely understand yet. There are many theories about what could be causing this disease resistance. But particularly the last two years, we’ve seen a very small amount of cucumber mosaic virus or pepper mosaic virus, which is a virus which attacks 800 species of plants, both monocots, grasses, and dicots, vegetable plants, and in fact, weeds as well. Our favorite weed, this Malva neglecta, is a place where the virus over-winters.

If I had seen this 10 years ago, I would’ve been scared to death, because cucumber mosaic virus can cause stunting of plants and diminished yield. But here we have this on our older leaves, mostly, and the plants outgrow it and in fact, are extremely vigorous. If we have any more peppers on these plants, you can see that the plants are falling over because there are so many peppers on this plant. And yet, if you look closely throughout all these plants, you see that there’s a small amount of this cucumber mosaic virus within the population of this living mulch field, yet it never seems to get to a point where we see a diminished yield.

So, the possibility is that these plants are kicking in with their immune system and in some way suppressing the cucumber mosaic virus. There are some theories that plants are encouraged to kick in their immune systems with microbial interactions, with soil microbe interactions, that may be enhanced by organic matter and organic residue additions which is what we think is going on here, but its still a new area and we’re not entirely sure.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT. 

Nitrogen

When I first started farming and working with other organic farmers twenty years ago, one of our greatest challenges was getting nitrogen, particularly nitrate-nitrogen to our crop so that we would have early crops. What organic farmers have always faced is a microbially-controlled nutrient release and thus availability to the crop so we tended to be a little slower. What I found working in this system, is that the challenge disappeared after about five or six years of the living mulch creating a recycled nutrient foundation.

So that here in Montana, where it's an even greater challenge than anywhere else I’ve farmed, to make sure that nutrients are available to the crop early enough, we’re getting the earliest tomatoes and red peppers, and in fact green bell peppers at the market than any of the other growers, including the conventional growers. One of the reasons is plants start growing very rapidly because the nutrients, particularly nitrogen, seems to be quite readily available. One of the things that helps this system is the black plastic. I don’t think in this climate, we could do this living mulch system with warm season crops without the heat increase that we get from the black plastic.

Another interesting thing I’ve noticed as a result of this constant addition of residues developing a foundation for a nutrient base is that we don’t have surges of nitrogen the way I used to when I would add a lot of compost or a green manure only in the spring, and till it under and it would be released and then we might side-dress later. What we found is increased crop quality and lasting ability. Peppers, for example, have very thick walls. They get less sun scald problems and we can do our specialty, which is red peppers, without losing as many. We don’t have as much wrinkling and again the breakdown issues that occur with high heat and sun. I suspect that the reason is that we’re seeing lower tissue nitrate-nitrogen. We’re also seeing higher levels of calcium in the tissue; that could also be a reason. But, I suspect it all boils down to the slow release nutrients that we’re maintaining within the system.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT.  

Soil Fertility

One of the exciting things that we’ve learned in exploring this living mulch system is number one: the nutrient balance that we’re seeing and number two: the side benefits of all of the organic residue addition over the last eleven years. We’ve found that this organic residue, even these legumes, that of course are nitrogen-fixing, that we add to the soil doesn’t necessarily provide nutrients immediately. When we mow like this, when we do the continuous residue application throughout the growing season, what we’re doing is building up a foundation of soil fertility that then releases slowly. So this residue that I’m mowing here, may be the nutrients for my crop next year.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT. 

Habitat for Beneficials

After quite a bit of study in 1995 and ’96, we found that because the living mulch has very close proximity to the crop, in other words, for every row of crop, there is a row of living mulch, we don’t diminish the beneficial or the pollinator insect populations when we mow. Also, as crops finish, like this broccoli here, we let it go to flower and seed and it provides more habitat for beneficial insects. And remember, one of the things that we’ve found is that it’s not just the flowering, the pollen and nectar source, that our parasitic wasps, and our syrphid flies and many of our other predator and parasites need. They also need the cover and even mowing maintains quite a bit of cover. One of the predators that needs this cover the most is ground beetles, carabid beetles. Also spiders require this cover. We found significant increases in the population of those kinds of predators by doing this mowing and leaving the residue on the surface.
 

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT. 

Weed Ecology

We’ve learned some stories about weed ecology as well. One of the weeds that has evolved, or at least been released from competition is this Malva neglecta or common mallow. It has basically formed a strong, dominant part of the vegetative system along with chickweed and all of the annual weeds that we had when we began; lamb’s quarters, redroot pigweed, quackgrass, have all disappeared or have been very much marginalized compared to these two weeds. There was a time when I was quite concerned about it, because it’s become very dominant as you can perhaps see here. I just happened to look up in Bob Parnes’ Fertile Soil what actually the nutrient value of this particular weed is. And according to Parnes, mallows contribute 80 lbs of nitrogen per ton, which is actually higher than what legume hay will contribute. So, what’s going on here is obviously, this is not a nitrogen fixer as the clovers are or as the legumes are, so how come there’s so much nitrogen? Basically what has been suggested is this plant is a very good scavenger, a very good accumulator of nitrogen and that it helps cycle it through the system and because I’m creating, over the last eleven years here, a system based on recycled nutrients, we’ve created perfect habitat for this scavenger.
 

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT. 

Cover Crops

The species of cover crops that I’ve used in my system are mainly legumes, mainly clovers. We’ve used Dutch white clover, Alsike clover, red clover, crimson clover, an annual clover called Berseem clover. I’ve also used a number of Australian medics, mainly because they’re drought resistant and they don’t require as much overhead irrigation to get them established. I’ve used snail medic and Parabinga medic. The seed has become somewhat expensive so I haven’t used those in the last few years.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT. 

Mowing is one of the major tasks on this farm. It’s important not only for weed management, but also for soil fertility maintenance. The most important weed component is that mowing will diminish any of the annual weeds, because we basically chop them off before they go to seed. In terms of soil fertility, what’s different about this system is that instead of growing a large amount of biomass and then tilling it in or mowing it down all at once, I do it periodically over the season. The reason that is, is we’re trying to mimic a natural prairie system, much like what would be growing around here and is growing around here in terms of the native vegetation. There, we don’t get one mass of organic residue addition all at once that the soil microbes then have to deal with all at once and they feel a little like we do after a big Thanksgiving dinner; a little sluggish and unable to digest it all at once. This way, mimicking a natural system, every three to four weeks, the clover gets to be a foot to two feet, and we often get bloom, and then we mow it down. The microbes have a steady diet to digest over the entire growing season.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT. 

System Overview

This cover crop I have here is most of my fertility and it’s going to provide the nutrients for next year’s crop. After harvest, we basically come through and mow everything down. In the spring, the compost is applied over the living mulch from the previous year, which is where the crop will go next year. Then I rip it with a modified potato cultivator. Then we make beds with the bed maker and there’s quite a bit of residue in the beds. If you were trying to plant directly into the bed without having the black plastic mulch, it would be very difficult, because there would be so much residue. We try to get the plastic on a couple of weeks before I transplant so that residue has a chance to break down within the bed. The clover recruits from last year and the newly-seeded living mulch start to come up. So about the time the transplants are eight to ten inches tall, we’re already getting cover. We try to make sure that soil is bare or uncovered for less than three to four weeks every year. Then the plants start to grow, we continue to irrigate the cover crop and drip irrigate the crop and there’s constant mowing of the residue.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT. 

Composting

This is the composting operation. I don’t use as much compost as I did eleven years ago. I’ve slowly decreased the amounts, so that we use about two tons per acre now, sometimes less. The way I make the compost is to add green succulent legumes, like this red clover, with straw bedding and sheep manure. Sometimes I’ll add other things, crop residues, but mainly these are the basic ingredients. I used to chop the clover and add it to the compost, but I have finally learned, after 20 years of composting that it's much easier to plant the clover where I’m going to compost, then keep it watered, put the other ingredients, like the manure and the straw on top of it and then I will be mixing it with the front-end loader. After the initial mixing of the compost ingredients, this pile will be turned many more times. But with this initial turning, I’ve mixed the manure, sheep manure, the bedding straw, the green succulent clover and I’ve gotten soil from underneath or associated with the clover root. But also this soil is where the compost was made last year. I’m adding a portion of composted material and a portion of regular soil to help balance the water relations within the compost pile.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This presentation was recorded live at the 2019 Organic Grain Conference, organized by the Land Connection with funding from NIFA OREI. Dr. Walter Goldstein of the Mandaamin Institute discusses his work on breeding corn with high protein quality and N efficiency/Nitrogen (N2) fixation, and ongoing efforts to test the hybrids on organic farms. According to Dr. Goldstein, the basis for N efficiency and protein quality in the Mandaamin Institute cultivars appear to be due to shifts in root efficiency, microbial relationships and metabolism. These may be based on the corn plant’s responses to reducing fertilization, including fostering beneficial plant/microbial partnerships. Results indicate the potential and importance of breeding under organic conditions.

The Organic Grain Conference 2019 theme was theme was “Exploring advancements and issues in organic grain farming, together.” Over 30 presenters and panelists delivered sessions on organic grain production, marketing, transition, certification, and emerging research. Twenty-two companies gathered at the trade show, and over 185 farmers, researchers, educators, and industry members attended.

Download the 2019 conference proceedings at https://thelandconnection.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/OGC_2019_Conference_Proceedings.pdf

The conference program is available at https://thelandconnection.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/OGC_2019_Program_0.pdf

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm. Stevensville, MT. 

I’m Helen Atthowe, BioDesign Farm, Stevensville, Montana. The field that we’re in was in hay for about 30 years, and then about eleven years ago, I started doing vegetable production. I had started in Masanobu Fukuoka's approach to minimum till, do-nothing kind of farming. Obviously, Montana was a bit more of a challenge than Japan. So what we’ve done here is tried to mimic the natural systems in Montana with quite a bit more water. We’re doing minimum till, we’re doing living mulches in between the crops so that our residue application is constant, rather than all at once in the spring.

The main crops on this farm are solanaceous crops. Basically we don’t have to market at all because solanaceous crops are hard to grow in Montana. That’s the reason I do it. Eggplants, tomatoes, green and red bell peppers are the main crops here. We throw a little broccoli in, so that we can grow something besides solanaceous crops but mainly, this farm grows solanaceous crops. We sell at Missoula Farmer’s Market and wholesale to local supermarkets in Missoula as well.

The way that I’ve designed this system is minimum labor, so I’m keeping it very small. You can see that I have very wide rows. That’s so I can get my equipment in here and mow. I do very little hand labor. We don’t weed at all. When I say “we” that’s kind of a misnomer. I don’t have as many tasks to do, and so I can run the place myself.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Ron Morse, Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA.

On June 3rd, I sowed this field into a bi-culture of foxtail millet and forage soybean. It grew very lush, it was approximately three and a half feet tall. Two months later, on August 3rd, I rolled this with a flail mower that was disengaged and it laid the residues flat. After a few days, I realized that the soybeans were still growing, so 10 days later, we took the flail mower, this time with it engaged and mowed off the growing soybean. As you can see, we have a very nice killed mulch, which should produce a good crop of broccoli without having to manually weed or use herbicides.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Danielle Treadwell, Center for Environmental Farming Systems. Goldsboro, NC.
 

We’re developing an organic, no-till, sweet potato production system for our growers here in North Carolina. Compost was applied in the fall. Cover crops were seeded using a Brillion cultipacker, which served two purposes: seeded the cover crops as well as flatten the tops of the hills that were made following compost. In the spring, when vetch was at mid-bloom, the cover crops were killed by rolling with the Brillion cultipacker. Ideally, the cover crops should be rolled in all the same direction for ease of transplant. Over the three years that we’ve been working on this system, the dry matter production of the rye has ranged from 3000-8000 lbs per acre. We’ve found that we get the most weed suppression with an increase in dry weight of rye.

This is the residue remaining sixty days after transplanting sweet potato. Mostly what remains is the rye, although we do have some vetch re-growth. I don’t perceive this to be a problem. We’ve had a fair amount of this residue remaining at harvest, which generally is about 100 days after transplanting for Beauregard.

This area has been hand-weeded three times. These plants are about sixty days old now. They were planted in late-June. The foliage growth that you see here is right about maximum.

These sweet potato transplants are actually sections of vine that are known as slips. Generally they are without roots and they were transplanted using a no-till transplanter designed by Ron Morse of Virginia Tech. The transplants are spaced about ten and a half inches apart and you can see here how the residue was cut with the coulter and slightly moved to the side, but yet it remains fairly well intact and undisturbed following the day of transplant.

One of the biggest concerns for organic growers is weed suppression. Beauregard is the dominant variety for sweet potato growers in our area here in North Carolina, but it’s slow to vine out, so we’re not really convinced that this is the best variety to use. Other varieties such as Jewel are very quick to vine out, but they have less yield than Beauregard. Fernandez might be another option. It has an intermediate vining speed between Beauregard and Jewel. It also has an intermediate yield.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Ron Morse, Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA. 

On October 3rd of last year, we sowed cover crops in the no-till plots and in the conventional we left the soil bare. During the winter, the cover crops grew very lush and of course, the conventional was basically just a few weeds. May 6th the soil was prepared in the conventional plot. We took my sub-surface tiller/transplanter, which is equipped to plant into very high residues. A lot of the residues were three, four, five feet high. We planted a twin row of potatoes right through the residues and we put the seed pieces about 5 inches deep in the raised bed and the transplanter virtually knocks over the majority of the residues. After about two and a half to three weeks, we will take a flail mower and keep it quite close to the ground just as the potatoes are emerging through the soil. We’ll then mow off anything that’s still growing. At that point, it basically controls all the living residue. The plants quickly emerge at that stage. In two weeks, you have two beautiful rows of potatoes, about a foot tall. Within another 3-4 weeks, you have complete canopy closure. We will harvest this crop in the next 2-3 weeks. We’ve had great luck with this system. The conventional has not proven to be the best treatment; in fact the no-till has out-yielded the conventional on an average of 17% over the last 8 or 9 years. Another beneficial effect is that no-till mulch controls Colorado Potato Beetle. We’ve seen it year after year. In these thick residues, the Colorado Potato Beetle simply do not thrive in these plots.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Ron Morse, Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA. 

Let me show you why pumpkins are becoming so popular in a no-till system. This is a young pumpkin that’s been set a week or two weeks. And notice that it‘s sitting on this mat of straw. As this thing matures, this mat of straw will stay there of course, and by the time this pumpkin is ready to sell, the quality then will be superior compared to one that is laying on the bare soil. This is a distinct advantage, and a driving force, for no-till pumpkins in the United States.

You always want to make sure you have a very good, uniform, high-density planting of cover crops. Normally, I use rye or rye/vetch, but I was extremely busy and so I didn’t have a field prepared. This year we produced oats and field peas. The amount of residue was three tons per acre. Normally I get up to four or five tons of rye or rye/vetch.

I have cut a section of residues out to show you the depth. Now remember this is oats and field peas and we only had 3 tons. But still you can see a nice, maybe ½” depth of residue. If this were rye or rye/vetch, there’s a possibility it would be almost double that and often times it is up to an inch and that gives you real good weed suppression and fruit quality.

An advantage of the enhanced amount of biomass or resides is that you get improved weed control. If you look in this field here, you’ll see the understory does have a few weeds, but because of the quick canopy closure of the pumpkin, we will still get excellent weed control and all of the weeds that emerge later, they won’t reduce yields.

In this field, the spring oats and field peas, and in some areas of the field we also have Austrian winter peas, were seeded the first week in April. Then grew about four to five feet high. We rolled them approximately the 10th of June. We then waited about three weeks and in the first part of July, we seeded with the Monosem seeder. This is late however; we normally would have seeded earlier. With rye, it tends to mature a little bit faster and so we can get in the field and seed around the middle of June. With oats, it took a while for them to mature, so we have to wait awhile. We plant in two-row systems. As you can see, we probably have a real good crop here, a real good stand.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Ron Morse, Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA. 

 Some of the folks make issue with the fact that they can’t afford this transplanter and they want me to develop something small for one to five acres.  The basic no-till planting aid would contain an upfront coulter and some kind of fertilizer knife. At least the larger ones would have a second toolbar or maybe even a third toolbar that would hold either a small seeder or a trash-clearing device. The types of seeder that I have seen work on a toolbar behind a tractor - the cheap Earthway seeder, you can get it for $75-90; there’s a lot of old seeders out there, a lot of John Deere 71 Flex seeders and equivalent types that will seed very well in these situations for a relatively cheap amount of money.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbryhlAb7lQ

Ron Morse, Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, VA. 

This is the Alamo Mott flail mower. We’ve been using it for 10 or 15 years on the farm. We originally used it just for flailing. Then, I, by accident one day discovered that it would roll. So we either flail or roll or sometimes both as necessary. What rolls really well is very mature cereal grains, like rye, wheat, barley. We’ve had excellent success year after year with a combination of pure rye or rye/vetch. The millets really roll well. We mix them with soybeans or cowpeas. You have to make sure that the millet and the cowpeas or soybeans are into the mature stage, preferably flowering. If you do that and can roll them with even the flail mower here, they will stay down with very little re-greening. Some legumes also roll very well, like mature crimson clover. Hairy vetch does not because it needs to be crimped. We’re really sold on the combination of flail mowing and rolling. This is economical because it does both. We have had good luck as long as our cover crops are mature.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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This is a Weed 'Em and Reap Part 2 video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8KW_Do3KjE

Nancy Creamer, Center for Environmental Farming Systems. Goldsboro, NC.

The undercutter was designed to kill cover crops and leave them on the surface as a mulch. By leaving cover crop residue intact versus mowing them into smaller pieces, growers can get longer weed suppression from the cover crop mulches. The first tool in the undercutter is this coulter that cuts through the cover crop. A lot of times we use hairy vetch which is quite viney, so we need to really have a clean cut so the rest of the implement can work. The second part of the undercutter is the cutting blade. And this we actually used a motor grader blade upside down and it cuts the whole width of the raised bed about 2” below the soil surface. Finally the last tool on the undercutter is this roller, which is just some notched steel and it just rolls the cover crop down nice and flat as it moves through the field.

There are several existing implements in agriculture that can be modified to do the same job as this, for example, a beet lifter might be used. While this system can work well in lighter soils and with good soil moisture, some further engineering would help it be more applicable with a broader range of soil types and soil moisture conditions. Weed suppression can last about 6 weeks, but it really depends on the thickness of mulch that’s left on the soil surface. Another thing that this system can really benefit from is a cultivator that could work underneath the killed residue if weeds do get out of control later in the season.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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