Integrating Winter Annual Oilseeds with Corn and Soybean Rotations in the Upper Midwest with Relay Cropping.

Cover cropping in corn and soybean rotations has the potential to mitigate many negative consequences of annual row cropping systems in the upper Midwest. However, there are several barriers to cover crop use and they are not widely used in the region. Relay cropping systems that overlap the growing seasons of winter annual oilseed crops with corn and soybeans could potentially overcome these barriers by extending the growing seasons of cover crops. Moreover, this is an approach to sustainable intensification that creates a new farm enterprise; producing biofuels without displacing food crops. We have found that field pennycress (Thlaspi arvense) and winter camelina (Camelina sativa) successfully grown in a relay system with soybean in the Upper Midwest may result in the production of more oil and more seed per acre than soybean monocrop.