Cornell Cover Crops

@agronomistag @JonEntine You can plant snap beans in 24" rows, and the flowers will dry faster than white mold can germinate. Nature is helping you. Or you can plant in 18" rows and the white mold will thrive. The former is working with nature on your side, the latter against.

@CropsCover @JonEntine Spoken like a pop ecologist. What do you mean by nature? Aren't weeds, pests, and diseases nature? What does it mean to have nature on your side? If you let nature have its way, crop production would not exist.

“Nature knows best” is the foundation of organic farming and an underlying assumption in much of agroecology. Pop ecology misleads crop production in three key ways: first, it trades scientific nuance for oversimplified certainty. Second, it treats unmanaged nature as the ideal standard and human intervention as suspect by default. Finally, it elevates the discredited concept of “balance of nature.” geneticliteracyproject.org/2026/03/11/vie… via @GeneticLiteracy

The National Cover Crop Survey is live: missouri.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1A… A wide range of farmer experienvce with #covercrops will help target future research and outreach to the most important needs.

@farmerdoug93 Great example of a reliable #covercrop program. Including the "depends."

@CropsCover I will spray to terminate and plant corn. Probably strip till some but depends on how much growth this spring.

Urea price just jumped 50%, and field corn is at only $4.30. Under what conditions will it pay to plant an N-fixing #covercrop instead this spring? Is that idea too radical?

@RogerGreeson The risk has already been mitigated. Good news! Planting a legume (probably medium red clover) now would only make sense if there was no nitrate in the ground, little mineralization expected and you were to forego corn on those acres so that there would be enough time.

@CropsCover In our area much of the N is already applied. What’s not applied is priced. To produce enough or much nitrogen from a legume would take quite a bit of time.

@MeredithAaron00 If you were to determine that you'd be raising corn at a loss, what are your options to use the summer differently?

@CropsCover Our struggle is getting the cover crop big enough to make a difference by the time we burndown in the spring. That’s always our dilemma, is later planting worth waiting on a cover crop…

@farmerdoug93 What is your termination plan? What follows this cover crop?

@CropsCover I put vetch down last fall with winter wheat cover crop. Hoping for success!

When testing living mulch as a #covercrop system, the default expectation has to be that the cover crop will compete too much with the main crop and that pest pressure will be higher. If the new system is an exception, the burden of proof is high if one is to be taken seriously.

@SamaHoole I think soil-health practitioners see the missing forest in that picture.

Let's play a game. You've got a steep hillside. Rocky. Thin soil. Gradient steep enough that a tractor becomes a personal injury claim waiting to happen. Dave from accounts has already found this out. Option A: Grow crops. Nothing with meaningful caloric yield grows here. The land is classified as Grade 4 or 5 agricultural land in England: officially unsuitable for arable cultivation. You get bracken. You get thistles. You get Dave's medical bills. Option B: Put some cattle on it. They eat the grass that naturally grows there. They convert vegetation a human cannot digest into protein and fat a human absolutely can. They get fat on nothing but pasture. You get beef, tallow, bones for broth, organs, and leather. The hillside is productive. Dave goes home safely. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation puts 2 billion hectares of the Earth's surface under permanent pasture: the vast majority of which is too steep, too arid, too cold, or too nutrient-poor to ever grow a crop intended for human consumption. Cattle aren't inefficiently competing with vegetables for good land. They're farming the 2 billion hectares of the planet where vegetables simply refuse to grow.

@AgPhDMedia This phenomenon is why we shouldn’t call #covercrops a “plow down”. Getting the biomass into the soil by biological means is better.

What happens when you till?

See the story of soil health icon Bianca Moebius-Clune and AFTs “New conventional farming” morningagclips.com/rediscovering-… @farmland @farmlandny

This picture is great in that it shows how big the mustard needs to be to have an effect. It also shows that mustard is effective against nematodes without soil disturbance, which is always a plus.

@grok @Sky1MrWalker Make sure there are no growing points below where they get chopped. Else they will come back!

@Sky1MrWalker Chop-n-drop is a great no-till method—chopping cover crops and leaving them as mulch boosts soil microbes and suppresses weeds (per UC Extension permaculture guides). For your garlic/potato bed, do it 2-4 weeks before planting to decompose. What cover crop are you using?

@grok may I make a active thread for US Predictions

#killontime for cover crop success. This article has some examples of when and how.

Keys to #covercrop success are #faststart and #nogaps. This grower met the first by using a planter for seeding when other methods had failed. But the covercrop does not suppress weeds in the gaps between rows. That managent goal is met with herbicides. farmprogress.com/cover-crops/ho…

@CotswoldSeeds If suppressing couchgrass is a priority, lots of research has shown that you would do well by planting just buckwheat and letting it do its thing well. It is also beautiful and easy to manage.

@nodigdon is hoping to change this, helped by our #covercrops 🐝. They said “Tired of weeds such as couch grass, buttercup, nettles & thistles creeping in, I tilled a 1m wide border next to the cropping area in July & sowed a diverse cover crop (8+ plants) from @cotswoldseeds.

Flying insects in the UK fell by 78% between 2004 & 2023! The Bugs Matter citizen science survey, led by the Kent Wildlife Trust and the Buglife conservation charity, found this shocking result based on the abundance of flying insects sampled on vehicle number plates in the UK.

The Cornell AgriTech Summer Scholars program is back! We are now accepting applications and are excited to recruit a new cohort of excellent undergraduates for summer 2026. cals.cornell.edu/cornell-agrite…

@sustainableag FY25 research grants that have been approved by NIFA are also stalled. We can't have research grinding to a halt.

The longest US shutdown may be over, but its impacts on farmers & families remain. Delayed loans, stalled conservation payments & reduced SNAP benefits pushed many to the brink. USDA must rebuild capacity with farmer input to prevent more harm: sustainableagriculture.net/blog/voices-fr… #ontheblog