Virtual Field Day – A New Direction in Cover Crops: Developing Perennial Ground Cover for Corn Systems in the Midwest

Join Iowa Learning Farms, the Iowa Nutrient Research Center (INRC), and Conservation Learning Group (CLG), for a FREE virtual field day.

The discussion will include D. Raj Raman, Morrill Professor of Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University, and Daniel Andersen, Associate Professor of Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University.

RegenPGC stands for Regenerating America’s Working Landscapes to Enhance Natural Resources and Public Goods through Perennial Groundcover. The vision RegenPGC is to make year-round groundcover on working lands the norm for Midwestern US agriculture and beyond. Central to the approach is developing and de-risking perennial groundcover (PGC) systems, where a perennial cover crop is planted once and then persists for multiple years alongside annual crops such as corn and soybean.

This project started nearly two decades ago, with Dr. Ken Moore, Distinguished Professor of Agronomy, and RegenPGC Educational Theme Leader, and his team exploring ways of planting a perennial cover between rows of corn. Early successes led to funding from the Sun Grant program, INRC, and others, and eventually to USDA’s-National Institute for Food and Agriculture Sustainable Agricultural Systems Coordinated Agricultural Projects program. RegenPGC was formally started in September, 2021, as a 5-year transdisciplinary project combining research, extension, education, and commercialization efforts.

Iowa Learning Farms Webinar: Disease and Yield Implications of Cereal Rye Before Corn

In the webinar, “What Lies Beneath: The Impact of a Cereal Rye Cover Crop on Corn Seedling Disease Severity,” Matthiesen will provide data and outcomes from a field experiment conducted during 2021-2023 at 16 locations in the U.S. in which the effects of termination timing of a cereal rye cover crop were evaluated.

Continue reading

Farmers are Covering Iowa

The Iowa Seed Corn Cover Crops Initiative is a new Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship Water Quality Initiative project that will run through 2018. This project is through the Iowa Seed Association in collaboration with the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, Iowa Corn Growers Association, and the Soil and Water Conservation Society.

Continue reading