Does Grazing or Haying Cover CROPS Affect Soil Properties?.

Cover crops are considered as a strategy to enhance long-term soil productivity and overall soil ecosystem services. There is, however, an increasing interest in grazing or haying cover crops in the emerging integrated crop-livestock production systems, particularly in the central Great Plains. Cover crops may supply some of the forage needs under increasing production costs and climatic fluctuations, but the effects of grazing or haying cover crops on soil processes such as compaction, water and wind erosion, aggregation, water infiltration, C and nutrient cycling, and others have not been widely studied in this region. We started an experiment in fall 2013 to assess how grazing wheat cover crop by cattle affect soil properties when cover crop is added to corn silage production in an irrigated corn-soybean system in eastern NE or eastern central Great Plains. Our preliminary results show that grazing of cover crops with and without corn silage had no effect on soil aggregation compared with systems without grazing of cover crops. More data are being collected from this short-term experiment and will be presented at the meetings. We also studied how haying winter and spring triticale cover crops for 5 yr affected soil physical properties when cover crops were used to replace fallow in a wheat-fallow system in western KS. Results showed that haying spring triticale and spring lentil cover crops for 5 yr did not affect water erosion or wind erosion potential, soil organic C pools, and soil structural properties compared with no haying. Data collected at this point appear to suggest that haying or grazing cover crops may not have negative soil and environmental consequences, but more long-term research is needed to fully discern the impacts of grazing/haying of cover crops on soil properties in the central Great Plains.