Erosion Spring 2017

           The winter of 2016-17 has been long, windy, cold, and with significant snow.  With frozen ground, and piled up snow I was sure that we would have horrible erosion in the area.  I was sort of looking forward to how our operation handled a fast melt condition.  As it has turned out, the heavy rains predicted didn't turn up, so we had as gentle of runoff as one could hope for.  At this point in time we have lost nearly all the snow except those areas that drifted heavily.  All of the cultivated fields seeded to WW have significant sheet and rill erosion, but it could have been a lot worse.

This pic shows conventional tilled field with a long slope showing significant erosion, --pretty typical.  It's noticeably more ugly where the corner was turned and vertical seeding took place.

This pic shows our CC seeded to WW.  The WW was seeded close to freeze up so it is just emerging now.  The ground is in great shape with most of the CC dead, but the late seeding will cost us yield.  I don't see any grassy weeds at this point in time.  The radishes appear to have done their job by intercepting water and helping penetrate the frozen ground.  We were able to intercept most of my neighbors water coming off a conventionally tilled field.  The thin standing radish residue did help intercept snow.  This greatly reduced the drifting.  The snow coverage wasn't as even as in the more dense, taller grain stubble.

This pic shows erosion in our field where there is virtually no ground cover and seeded vertically.  This is WW on WP ground.

This pic is the same field (WW on WP) but in an area where the seeding was done on contour.  Even with our ULD-DS system using the CrossSlot drill, erosion will happen if you don't have good surface cover, or if you are seeding vertically.  There were no radish holes for intercepting and moving water through the frost layer.  The pic shows staining in the lower half.  You don't see the erosion tracks in the top half but they are there, --following the drill rows and breaking out, going down the slope.  The soil was redeposited down slope leaving this track, and most of the water lost had a low sediment load.  It will be a challenge to maintain adequate surface coverage when low/no residue spring crops are grown.  In this situation if we would have seeded earlier and also seeded a low rate (0.5-1.0#?) of radish with the WW, less erosion would have resulted.  I would like to see radish going into the winter about 1" diameter and ≈24" long, and ≈48" apart (it's a guess).  That's doable if seeded by first of October in our climate.  When radish freezes(dies), the tuber shrinks quickly.  I'm convinced this will be a good practice.  It's the plant population that is the unknown for me.