Cattle producers and researchers are always considering new approaches to production systems that are economically beneficial and ideally have an environmental benefit as well.
“The industry is making great progress with improving methane emissions from beef cattle, but we are lacking in improvement with nitrogen emissions,” says Andrew Foote, Oklahoma State University animal and food sciences associate professor.
In a recent release distributed by OSU, it was announced that a multidisciplinary group of scientists are teaming up to research how cover crops can improve the environmental impacts of cattle foraging.
Fertilizing crops and cattle foraging on harvested cropland cause methane and nitrogen emissions.
“That’s why we came up with this research project to look at using legume cover crops in the summer to fix nitrogen in the soil to minimize the amount of fertilizer producers need to put down for planting wheat in the fall,” Foote explains. “We want to see if we can better use wheat cropland between harvesting winter wheat in the spring and planting it again in the fall. On the economic side, could you get another grazing period over the summer or more hay using these four-season cover crops? Then there is the environmental benefit of fixing the nitrogen into the soil.”
The research team includes Mary Foltz, OSU School of Civil and Environmental Engineering assistant professor, and Josh Lofton, OSU plant and soil sciences associate professor and Extension specialist for cropping systems.
Lofton recently planted legume cover crops in wheat fields to grow during the summer. Legumes place nitrogen into the soil through a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria in their roots.
Foltz’s team is placing chambers to capture and measure carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions in wheat fields with different combinations of cover cropping, fertilizer and cattle grazing treatments to determine if the cover crops decrease overall greenhouse gas emissions.
“Hopefully, we are going to be able to assess the impact of grazing, cover cropping and fertilizer on these different gas emissions with the biggest focus on nitrous oxide, as it is the most potent of the greenhouse gases,” Foltz explains. “The ideal scenario is that applying the cover crops will reduce the dependence on synthetic fertilizers and increase soil stability by decreasing soil erosion.”
Foote says OSU Extension will offer forage analysis to producers using summer cover crops when they provide forage samples, and the group will eventually host field days to demonstrate the research results.
The next step will include OSU agricultural economics faculty developing a spreadsheet-based budgeting tool to help producers figure out the economics of their production system and how the cover crops could work for them.
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