Conservation tillage for forage Brassicas

Excerpt

CONSERVATION tillage practices may play a key role in the reintroduction of forage Brassica crops, such as turnips, rape, swedes, and kale, for livestock production in the United States. Early settlers in the United States, who knew these crops to be good animal feed, brought Brassica seed with them from Europe. Since then, however, many new cultivars of forage Brassicas have been developed in Europe and New Zealand. Agronomists in more than 15 states currently are testing these cultivars for adaptation to local conditions, mostly with conventional seeding methods.

In contrast, we have attempted to develop technology that would permit use of conservation tillage practices to establish stands of forage Brassicas in living sod. Among the advantages of these practices over conventional planting are the following:

1. Soil erosion is reduced (1).

2. Less soil moisture is lost because the sod acts as a mulch.

3. Time is saved in planting the crop (1).

4. The sod permits livestock grazing in inclement weather with little crop loss due to trampling.

Conservation tillage can be used effectively to produce highly nutritious Brassica crops. But its use is not without some problems, a number of which we encountered during our six years …