Glenda Pereira: 00:25
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. This is your host, Dr. Glenda Pereira, an assistant professor at the University of Maine and the dairy specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. For today’s episode, we actually have a repeat guest. So I’m joined by Jason Lilley, who’s a colleague of ours based out of Cumberland County, but has statewide responsibilities for the maple industry.
Jason Lilley: 00:50
Yeah. That’s right.
Glenda Pereira: 00:51
Yeah. So Jason’s a maple production specialist, but that’s not his only title. He’s a wealth of knowledge for all things agriculture. I’d say commercial ag in general.
Glenda Pereira: 01:02
You cover every topic. So, Jason, thanks for joining us again. And today, we’re gonna be talking about some of the work you’ve been conducting related to cover crops. That’s some research you’ve been doing here in Orono. And I think it’s timely because we’re going into the fall season.
Glenda Pereira: 01:19
Tell us a little bit more about everything cover crop related, and I’m ready to learn because this is not a topic of expertise for me. So I’m excited to learn from you.
Jason Lilley: 01:28
Right. Yeah. This is one of those areas that has been near and dear to my heart for a long time. Before I went back to grad school, I worked on several fruit and vegetable farms from Maine down to the Mid-Atlantic and even in South America, and did quite a bit of work focused on the soil.
Jason Lilley: 01:50
You know, if we don’t have vibrant, healthy soils, we’re going to just be continuing to deplete those soils, and it’s going to be harder and harder to get our crops, livestock feed, or whatever it is out. So the last farm that I worked at before grad school had about 85 acres of land in an organic mixed vegetable operation. They produced 35 acres of vegetables every year, which means that they had about 50 they could just rest. And they were doing really cool things with different species of cover crops, ways of terminating the cover crops, and even playing with the equipment to have reduced tillage and to just do what they could to build that soil back up before going back into a production season. That was one of the experiences that got me really engaged and interested in the topic, and it led me to grad school to look at a cover crop–based reduced tillage, a strip tillage system so that we could build the soils while we have crop production.
Jason Lilley: 03:03
It didn’t work so well, but we still had a fun research project that I learned a lot from. So that’s kind of the foundation of the experiences that I had and brought to my work in this role within Extension. My primary roles, as Glenda said, are focused in Cumberland County, but my responsibilities are to support farmers in Cumberland, Androscoggin, and Sagadahoc counties. We have a lot of small- and large-scale vegetable operations. So I work a lot with them and work to develop systems and approaches to increase soil health.
Glenda Pereira: 03:49
Yeah. And it’s funny you bring this up because when I traveled to Maryland two years ago, everybody does no-till. And they were astonished when I would tell them that in Maine there’s still a lot of folks who don’t. And they were just like, what? Like 90% of the acres in Maryland are no-till.
Jason Lilley: 04:11
Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 04:12
And a lot of it is for nutrient management and, like you mentioned, retaining and keeping those nutrients in place, which cover crops also help with. I don’t know what the percentage of acres in Maine is, and I know it’s all about timing, which we’re gonna talk about soon. But even out west, you know, cover crops in the Midwest are heavily used because it’s just a way to get ready for the next season, among many other things.
Jason Lilley: 04:42
And in Maryland, and increasingly in Vermont and upstate New York, there are programs and incentives—and in some cases requirements—that you’re using these soil health systems. That’s because of the really extreme degradation of water quality in those areas. The Chesapeake Bay has complete areas of dead zones. There’s so much soil loss, among other reasons. You know, it had leaky wastewater treatment facilities and things like that. But when you apply this excessive amount of manure and nutrients to the soils, and then you don’t stabilize those soils, those nutrients end up in the waterways.
Jason Lilley: 05:32
They create these big algal blooms and that sucks all the oxygen out of the water, and you have these dead zones in what were very vibrant and important fisheries. Lake Champlain in the New York and Vermont areas is experiencing similar issues. We have amazing water resources here in Maine, and I think it’s partially because of the extent to which we’re still forested that the issues haven’t been as bad as in those other regions, but we still really need to be looking after those resources. So that’s one reason why we should all be cover cropping and reducing tillage, but also just the huge amount of agronomic benefits that we get out of it.
Jason Lilley: 06:20
So the increased organic matter and increased ability to hold onto nutrients, the increased water infiltration and ability to hold onto water—all of that comes from not beating the soils up too hard through tillage, but also feeding those soils through cover crops and different organic amendments.
Glenda Pereira: 06:42
Yeah. But something that farmers have faced year after year is the timing, right? Every season’s different. This year we’re in drought. So people might be doing their second cutting soon.
Jason Lilley: 06:56
Right.
Glenda Pereira: 06:57
Right? Just because we’ve been so dry. So that puts them a little bit behind. So talk to us about some considerations for folks as they start planning their next couple of weeks going into the fall.
Jason Lilley: 07:10
Yeah. I always encourage folks to think about their cover crop at the same time that they’re thinking about their crop seed plan and crop rotation plan. One tool that I work with farms on is to actually write out and either create an Excel spreadsheet or use graph paper and make that crop rotation plan and find out where the windows are. Maybe it’s in-season. So for a vegetable operation, maybe you harvest your garlic and you have that window of open ground until you put winter greens in.
Jason Lilley: 07:45
So what is something that we could put in that window from late July to September? Buckwheat is something that works really well in a short midsummer window like that. For other folks in our dairy systems, corn silage crops are not coming off until later in the fall. So we need to think about different species and different approaches to getting that seed on. One project that I’ve been working on for the last three years is thinking about what do we do when we have that latest planting of sweet corn, or even more extreme, the latest storage cabbage or winter squash—things that are coming off really late in the season. And even for winter rye—that’s our workhorse here in the Northeast—we can put that in pretty late and get some benefit out of it. But if we’re harvesting cabbage that literally has frost on it and the ground is starting to freeze, we’re going to put that seed out there and it’s just going to sit dormant until the springtime.
Jason Lilley: 08:54
So our research project has been on interseeding and looking at going in just as the cash crop is getting established and broadcasting our seed over the top of it to get the cover crop established. Then it hopefully kind of goes dormant under the cash crop. And as soon as we mow that off, that lets the sunlight into the cover crop and we have something there for the winter. It worked pretty well. You know, it’s going to be a little more weedy. It’s not as clean and uniform as if we just did a full-width seeding. But to me, the alternative is no cover crop and exposed soils in the spring or having this type of coverage.
Glenda Pereira: 09:42
And you said you tried it with winter rye that you guys used, or what?
Jason Lilley: 09:46
So we trialed that, and I didn’t really have high hopes for that in this application, but we tried rye and vetch, oats and peas, and annual ryegrass and crimson clover. Annual ryegrass isn’t used as much for cover cropping, partly because it’s a little more spindly and it doesn’t grow as tall as quickly. But that’s beneficial in this scenario because you don’t want something that’s going to compete with your cash crop—you don’t want to essentially plant a weed. So that one was what we found to work the best: annual ryegrass and crimson clover. We’d wait until about thirty days after we seeded or transplanted a crop, which lined up really well with our last cultivation. We also found that if we worked the seed in with cultivation, it would be much more reliable and germinate better than if we just broadcast it and left it on the surface. So that was pretty exciting—to say you don’t even necessarily need to add another job. If you can rig up a seed spreader to distribute it on the front of your cultivation unit and you’re going to make that cultivation pass anyway, then you really haven’t added another pass or anything. You’ve just got your cover crop there.
Glenda Pereira: 11:10
That’s sweet. Yeah. And adds less inputs, which I know folks—getting another pass right at that time when you’re storing, getting things closed down for the winter—
Jason Lilley: 11:27
Right.
Glenda Pereira: 11:27
It can be hard for folks to get back out there. So the two-in-one approach must have worked really well. Yeah. Beneficial.
Jason Lilley: 11:35
And the idea came from when I was at Penn State and the research team that I was just kind of in the same lab as—they were doing extensive work in grain and field corn systems. So we were like, well, maybe that could work in sweet corn. But all that just to say there has been a lot of work, at least in the Mid-Atlantic region, to see how well this works and what’s the optimal timing and cover crop species for field corn. Because we know that field corn is a much larger plant and shades the soils much more quickly than sweet corn.
Glenda Pereira: 12:12
Yeah. Yeah. So talk to us more about—so we’ve covered a bit of timing, potential species. Do you want to add anything on the species that work really well here in the state of Maine?
Jason Lilley: 12:26
Yeah. So I guess I’ll mention that I am the Maine representative for the Northeast Cover Crop Council. The Northeast Cover Crop Council is a group of researchers, industry folks, Extension folks, and farmers who are just really into geeking out on cover crops. We meet monthly, we organize an annual conference, and we also try to collaborate on various tools—either joint research projects or one tool that I’m very excited about and kind of proud to have been a part of is the Cover Crop Species Selector tool. You can find that on the NECCC website. How it works is you can put in your site characteristics—it will sometimes automatically pull your soil characteristics—and then you put in your specified goals and when your cash crop is there. So you can take all that data, mostly leaning into what your goals are, and it will rank all the different cover crops for what will help you achieve those goals. It’s very helpful—a really good tool for decision-making. I get a lot of calls asking, “What cover crops should I put in?” and I usually come back with a series of five questions because it’s not really that straightforward. If you’re just getting used to it and you don’t have a lot of equipment, a lot of times I’ll say try oats and peas. If you’re more of a commercial scale, maybe say try winter rye. But if someone is really trying to dial in and alleviate a specific problem or achieve a specific goal, I want to sit down with folks and figure out all the conditions and make sure we’re giving them a recommendation that’s going to help them achieve those things.
Glenda Pereira: 14:43
Yeah. And the other thing too is some of these cover crops become cash crops.
Jason Lilley: 14:50
Mhmm.
Glenda Pereira: 14:50
For some people, they are cash crops, right? They’re planting in the fall and, depending on whether you’re wanting to extend the grazing season, that’s—you know, we don’t think about it as a cash crop, but at the end of the day, it is. Or if you’re wanting to harvest, like, triticale in the spring to feed to your animals—that’s a cash crop. It’s multi—it’s dual purpose, right? It’s a cover crop, but it’s also a cash crop.
Glenda Pereira: 15:22
Do you see a lot of folks taking advantage of that as well, or is it mostly people just needing something to keep things in place, stabilize during the winter? I know in other areas of the country, they really make that another cash crop they can take advantage of.
Jason Lilley: 15:42
Yeah. This is a hot button topic. Don’t bring this up at a Cover Crop Council meeting because you’ll be there for a while. And part of the question—”Is it a cover crop? Is it a cash crop?”—comes from NRCS funding.
Glenda Pereira: 15:56
And—
Jason Lilley: 15:57
There are some stipulations that if you’re looking to get cost-share support to put the seed down, you need to affirm that you are going to work that into the soil and not harvest the biomass away. I think that the root biomass that you’re achieving—even if you only leave that—you’re still getting a lot of benefit out of that crop.
Glenda Pereira: 16:25
To consider.
Jason Lilley: 16:25
Yeah, totally. There’s definitely a lot of that in the economic calculators. One thing I’ve seen from research projects is that from a purely financial standpoint, the fastest way—and sometimes the only way—to make an economic profit from cover cropping in the short term is to graze on those lands. And with that, you’re recycling nutrients, taking the grass off, but you’re putting manure down. So there’s definitely a lot of benefit to that. And I should mention that as part of the interseeding project—or a slight spinoff—UMaine Extension and the UMaine Business School just released an enterprise budget tool. Instead of just looking at tomatoes or cabbage or sweet corn, we’ve incorporated the cover cropping costs and a few different cover cropping scenarios into that tool. That’s something we’re excited about. We just released it about a month ago. And one more example: that farm I mentioned that I worked at right before grad school, they’re really into cover cropping mixes. As you mix more species together, you get more benefits, more root dynamics, different types of exudates. But you’re also adding to the cost. One way that farm pays for it is they sell cut flowers in addition to vegetables. They put sunflowers in that mix—big long taproots, lots of carbon in the stalk—and they’ll harvest those and sell them for like $9 a stem. That completely pays for their seed and more.
Glenda Pereira: 18:26
It’s maybe finding that diversification, or how you really make that extra income to cover that variety mix that you’re benefiting from. There’s a lot of benefit, but it comes at a cost, like you mentioned. Totally.
Glenda Pereira: 18:47
So before we wrap up the episode, I just wanted to get a timeline for folks. When would you say is the last day—roughly the range—where you can really plant a cover crop? I know for the late crops it’s probably right up near frost time—your first frost. But give us sort of a general timeline so folks can be thinking, “Am I behind? Am I just looking to get into this now?” Where do they figure that out for themselves?
Jason Lilley: 19:25
Yeah. It definitely varies by soil and your location in the state. But let’s just say for Central Maine—well, actually here in Old Town, Orono—the first frost date is October 1. So I’d say for winter rye—again, our workhorse—you can put that seed down whenever. I wouldn’t put it on top of snow or frozen ground, but I’ve worked with folks in the Midcoast region who will put it down in early November. Some years we get lucky and it stays warm until Thanksgiving. That will germinate, but you’re going to have like an inch-long sprig sticking up out of the ground. It will still come and give you coverage in the spring. The optimal time to put it down is mid-September to mid-October. I just wrapped up a two-year project as part of the Cover Crop Council’s joint research projects. We were looking at legume cover crops from Delaware, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine. We found that if we planted six weeks before the first frost—mid to late August—those legumes would germinate and thrive. If we planted three weeks before the first frost—so mid-September—they just really did not do well. It’s definitely season by season, but you might end up wasting that money on seed. For winter-killed cover crops, you want to have those in by August. So I say oats and peas, you want them in by September at the latest.
Jason Lilley: 21:27
And then there’s all sorts of different ones. Jaime, our forage specialist, and I have a project between Old Town and Falmouth, where my office is. We’re looking at warm-season grasses. People ask me, “Should I use sorghum-Sudan grass or Sudan millet?” and I’m always like—they all have different characteristics, but I’ve only seen them planted at different times and locations. So we want to look at them side-by-side so we can make better recommendations for folks that want that coverage mid-summer—maybe use it as forage or maybe just use it for biomass. We’re always trying to learn ourselves, but also trying to stay on top of current research to help folks make those decisions as best as they can and give them local experience. If someone calls and says, “It’s September and I want to put down hairy vetch,” I’ve got a different recommendation now than I did three years ago because of that direct experience we had.
Jason Lilley: 22:46
Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 22:48
Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Jason, for giving us your insight on this topic. We have more to look forward to, it seems like. You and Jaime will have this project, potentially with some results next year that we can hear more about. If folks want to reach out to Jason for recommendations, check out the NECCC tool.
Glenda Pereira: 23:09
That’s the cover crop—what’s the title again?
Jason Lilley: 23:12
It’s the Northeast Cover Crop Council’s Cover Crop Species Selector Tool.
Glenda Pereira: 23:17
Selector Tool. Be sure to email Jason. His email is jason.lilley@maine.edu. Or, you know, you can reach out to us at our Extension email and we’ll forward that on to Jason. So thank you so much, Jason, again.
Glenda Pereira: 23:35
And we’ll look forward to having you another time on the podcast.
Jason Lilley: 23:39
Yeah. Thanks so much, Glenda.
Glenda Pereira: 23:41
For folks who have topic suggestions, questions, or comments, be sure to email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.