Continuum Ag’s season looks different with no-till, cover crops

As a pioneer in sustainable agricultural practices, Continuum Ag’s winterization efforts look a little different from those of traditional farms.

The company puts incredible time and effort into cereal rye cover crops, a practice owners say helps ensure soil health and retention throughout the year.

“We use cover crops to protect the ground over the winter,” CEO and President Mitchell Hora said. “Then, next spring, we’ll no-till soybeans directly into this.”

The practice has a range of implications. For one, it drastically changes the math on fertilizer needs.

“We’ve been able to decrease our synthetic fertilizer by 45% over the last couple years,” Hora said. “With regenerative practices improving the soil biology, you get more natural recycling … it’s just like human health, if you eat healthy and treat your body well, you rely less on medicine and vitamins because you’re just naturally healthier. It’s the same thing for the soil.”

The farm grows around 55 pounds per acre of its 700-acre farm, save for a small section used as a control group. While that’s a healthy yield, Hora said the harvest was exclusively kept for seed, not sold as product.

"We can, but for us there’s not really a market for it,“ he said. ”You can feed it to pigs, but my average yield on this rye is going to be about 30 bushel an acre, not that much. I can grow corn at 270 bushel an acre, and feed way more pigs … that’s a huge piece of it, just the sheer production volume is totally different. Thirty bushels of rye sold as feed, I can maybe get $4, but it’s just not worth it.“

That’s not to say the cover crops are cost negative. Hora said they saved the farm money by stacking up other cost-saving outcomes for the following year.

“In total, it costs us about $20-$25 an acre to plant cover crops, with the seed, the equipment, the labor,” he said. “But our main thing is this cover crop is my nutrient stabilizer, and it’s my fertilizer program for next year … we’ve also decreased our herbicides by 75%. That’s $15-$30 an acre on herbicide, sometimes even more than that, and on fertilizer, especially this year, that’s going to be a $30-$40 an acre savings.”

While the no-till and cover crop harvest plan differs from traditional practices, Hora said it was significantly less work.

“Most farmers would do multiple passes across the field and all that, so we’re coming in right after we harvest and we’re just drilling in this cover crop,” he said. “All I’m doing is just planting this cover crop and then walking away. Most farmers are going to till the field now, till it again, maybe twice in the spring and spend all kinds of diesel fuel. We’ve actually decreased the size of our tractor because we don’t need as much horsepower.”

Brian Hora, Mitchell’s father and fellow Continuum Ag farmer, said the process of getting rye in the ground was something of a mad dash after harvest, as they race to maintain the soil’s newfound nitrogen it can run off.

“Our primary focus is trying to get the cover crop on everything, in the fall that becomes a priority … It’s a completely different mentality,” he said. “We used all the nitrogen back in July and August that we put on. It’s the nitrogen that became available in September and October, and now November, that’s what we’re trying to get a hold of. Data shows that if we don’t get it into the cover crop, we will lose it by spring.”

Even when they can’t get it in the ground as fast as they’d like, Brian Hora said late was better than never.

“I want to get it out there as fast as I can in the fall, because the bigger it gets, the more nitrogen it picks up,” he said. “If I can’t get it done, I’ll get it in there whenever I can because in my view, it’s never too early to start planting cover crops, and it’s also never too late. Even if it doesn’t grow this fall, it will grow in the spring.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com