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This season will be our first year implementing and experimenting with the use of cover crops. We aren’t really sure what to expect or how they will work with our system, but there’s only one way to find out.

The idea behind cover crops is simple enough: farmers go to great lengths to maintain empty fields, but nature doesn’t have bare soil, and bare soil causes a range of issues for agriculture. From evaporation and drought to wind erosion, compaction and weed proliferation. In the case of our farm, we leave a lot of weed species (weeds being plants that are uniquely adapted to colonize bare soil) out there which interfere with crops, and we spend a lot of time weeding crops by hand, or a lot of time on tractors keeping areas we don’t use “clean.” That is to say, bare, empty, and devoid of life.

As is the norm in many industries, we humans have put an enormous amount of energy and engineering resources into designing things to solve problems created by our actions. We spend considerably less energy and resources learning how to utilize the great machinery already designed by nature, or bothering to understand how it functions.

An alternative to cultivators and chemicals is to use plants. Some have fibrous roots, some have taproots, some harbour bacteria that make Nitrogen available, others form relationships with beneficial fungus. Some grow fast, some grow slow, some flower early, and some flower late. Some are C3 photosynthesizers and some are C4 photosynthesizers. Some are annuals and some are perennials.

All plants are incredible things that are actively inspiring and conducting change in the soil in which they are growing. All plants are fostering a unique bond with the life in the soil that surrounds them.

Cover crops require seeing various plants as tools…using what nature already designed to help us achieve our goals. With our inexperience we will keep things as simple as possible for the first season and consider very basic goals and see what happens. As of right now our considerations are:

1) Fast-growing plants that germinate early and out-compete weeds.

2) Plants that will be easily “terminated” by mechanical means.

2) Plants that will die over the winter, leaving a layer of organic material on the surface that we can plant directly into the following spring.

We have yet to make any choices, but I will likely have a lot more to say about cover crops over the course of the season as we experiment and see how things go, assessing progress along the way.

Personally I am optimistic about potential outcomes and excited to dive into using plants as tools. It’s been something I’ve wanted to try for a long while now and can’t wait to put our first seeds in the ground and see what happens!

Stay curious!

Graham

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