Annville, Pa., no-tiller Zach Alger is a big believer in the benefits of cover crops.

His 318-bushel corn yield was good enough for first place in the state’s 2023 NCGA Corn Yield Contest. Alger says planting conditions across his farm have improved quite a bit since he started using wheat as a cover crop about 10 years ago.  

“I’ve gotten into boating the last couple years. It does kind of bother me — I’ll go down to the Chesapeake Bay and there’s a lot of dead fish down there. You see them and the cornstalks floating right next to it and some stuff that looks suspiciously like manure. I want to keep that stuff in the field.

“I put manure on again this year. I kind of had to cheat a little bit. It was a little bit wetter than I would’ve liked when we put the manure on. There’s some compaction there. I think having the cover crop there, not only does that root mass help protect the soil from wheel traffic, but that cover crop is there growing now, and I think those roots, if I let them go a week or 2, I think it could almost grow some of the compaction out. We’ll see. Maybe it won’t work, but you don’t know until you try.”

Zach wants to use cereal rye eventually, but he says it’s very expensive in his area, so he hasn’t tried it quite yet.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.