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MCGA supports cover crop experimentation through Innovation Grants

A south central Minnesota farmer is entering his second year experimenting with cover crops through financial support provided by the Minnesota Corn Growers Association (MCGA).

Dan Coffman of Nicollet says he took advantage of Innovation Grant dollars and had a lot of success growing cover crops in the first of a three year project.

“We wanted to incorporate cover crops into standing corn.  Doing some research, I figured the best way to do that would be to inter-seed a cover crop around V4 to V7 into the corn.”

Coffman seeded a blend of rye, triticale, turnip, radish and rapeseed, using a homemade inter-seeding machine built out of a cultivator.

He says the cover crop achieved excellent growth early, then went dormant during the growing season.

“And as the corn leafs started to drop in the fall and the plants started to mature, the cover crop started to grow again.  We didn’t really see any yield loss from that in the fall.  I was doing the tillage on that field and it almost seemed like the tilth of the soil was better from the cover crops that were in the field.”

Coffman tells Brownfield the plan this year is to aerial seed the same mix over the same field, which will be soybeans, sometime in mid-September.

MCGA Innovation Grants are available to Minnesota farmers in numerous categories, including corn utilization, agronomy, soil fertility, and water quality.