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Are cover crop roots plugging tile lines?

A conservation specialist says there has been increased concern that cover crops roots could be clogging drainage tiles.

Barry Fischer with the Natural Resources Conservation Service says weather conditions in 2015 were just right for roots to penetrate deep into the soil profile, “We had a really wet spring, we washed a lot of nutrients deep into the soil, we got a lot of sediment into our tile lines, crop residues into our tile lines, and then it turned off dry. So as it turned off dry in the late fall, crop roots got down deep. We had a dry fall, so cover crop roots got deep quickly and then we virtually had no winter.”

While the number of inquiries this spring were more than usual, Fisher says it was on a very limited area where cover crops are planted.

He tells Brownfield he doesn’t anticipate this being a major problem across all acres.

However, “As we now know to watch for some of these conditions, we would do some things like if we saw those conditions setting themselves up again, we would probably be prepared to terminate cover crops a little earlier.”

Roger Wenning farms in southeast Indiana and has been utilizing cover crops since the 1970’s.  He says farmers and cover crop experts are digging into the issue, “We are looking at some ways to check and work on things, possibly send some cameras up some tile lines at different times of the year to assess what is actually happening.”

He says they’ll continue to study how and why cover crops might be plugging tile lines to prevent the problem from getting any bigger.