Extreme Cover Crop Use for Transition of Erosive West Texas Sandy Soils to Permanent No-till Cropping.

Approximately two million acres in the Texas South Plains region is dryland agriculture, much of it highly erosive sandy loam and even loamy sand soil, especially south of Lubbock. The objective of this project is absolute biomass production using sorghum/sudan in a dryland cropping system to quickly generate a blanket of plant residues to protect the soil surface. This work focuses on Year 1 and Year 2 of the transition phase for bare-soil farming in the lower Texas South Plains. In 2014 & 2016 sorghum/sudan hybrid SX-17 (Sudax Forages) was drilled at Lamesa, TX on a Amarillo fine sandy loam at 20 kg/ha on flat land. Harvest biomass on Sept. 3 ranged from 0.4-1.2 tons/ha. Regrowth from this area yielded 1.4-3.6 ton/ha, whereas season-long growth was 2.6-4.9 tons/ha. Biomass measures represent different potential cropping scenarios if the forage is harvested for hay (or grazed), and if so how much regrowth occurs. By the following spring, biomass was mostly on the ground, but proved more than adequate to prevent erosion by soil or rain, and conventional planter equipment was able to cut the forage and plant cotton without plugging of the planter. The high-biomass approach appears sufficient to initiate a higher level of soil protection in transition to dryland, no-till farming in this region.