Cover Crops and Crop Rotations for Winter Wheat.

Introducing crop rotations has been of great benefit to winter wheat production as a means of allieviating disease, pest, and weed pressures. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in including cover crop mixtures during the summer fallow period following winter wheat or winter canola. This can be challenging in the Southern Great Plains where summer rainfall is limited. An experiment to evaluate the effects of cover crop mixtures in common winter crop rotations in the SGP was established in Lahoma, OK in 2013. Soil moisture, soil NO₃ and NH₄, bulk density, canopy cover of cover crop, stand compostion of cover crop mixtures, and yield of the cash crop were all evaluated compared to a summer fallow.