Winter wheat/winter pea, winter rye/hairy vetch.

Poor (rolled down fine, but came right back).

Tomatoes—excellent (400,000 'Roma' fruit per acre); corn and beans—poor (90 bu/ac and 15 bu/acre, respectively).

Vetch, rye.

Mostly good to excellent (some plots required replanting due to heavy mulch residue and poor seed-to-soil contact).

Mostly excellent (yields higher—up to 38 bu/ac—in plots where hairy vetch did not create an excessive mulch mat. Where hairy vetch was present, yields were as low as 20.8 bu/ac.

Balansa clover, rye.

Poor.

Poor.

Winter rye, spring oats, spring barley.

Several passes required to terminate the rye.

Crop failure.

Five Points site: Rye, triticale, Austrian
winter pea, balansa clover.

Guinda site: Rye, triticale, vetch.

Madera site: Rye, triticale, balansa clover and winter pea.

The cover crops did not seem to die soon after rolling. This was one of our biggest surprises. We did not see a means of planting or transplanting—and subsequently recommencing irrigations—at the time of rolling. It seemed in fact, to actually take 3-4 weeks for the cover crops to die. Whether that was due to rolling primarily, or perhaps to drying soil is not known.

At Madera, where we transplanted eggplant, approximately 3-4 weeks following rolling, close to 100 percent of rye was dead, about 80 percent of the pea was dead, and about 50 percent of the balansa clover was dead. All of them, though, eventually died during the course of the season. At Guinda, about 90 percent to 99 percent of the rye covers died; however, only about 50 percent of the vetch died within this time period.

Five Points: There was no viable harvestable cotton crop. Stand establishment was a huge problem. Cotton only came up—after initial soil drying during cover-crop dying period—following subsequent irrigation. By then it was too late for it to grow, develop and produce lint.

Madera: Yields were carefully measured; about 20 percent yield of standard plastic system for eggplant.

Guinda: Crop abandoned due to too many problems, not the least of which was inadequate kill of vetch cover crop.

Can successfully kill rye with rolling alone, but timing is key. Reduced herbicide rates plus rolling looks good for rye management. We had some success with rolling hairy vetch alone, but corn planting was too late. We experienced crop failure with canola control using the roller alone.

Further evaluation of effectiveness on no-till planter tool modifications.

1) Weights were added to each planter row (130 pounds/row; 520 pounds total) for additional ballast to facilitate cutting through the heavy hairy vetch mat. This worked well.

2) Focus on new adaptation of cast-iron closing wheels to get better seed-furrow closure (and related increases plant population rates). This also worked well.

Comments: As we become more familiar with and fine-tune this system—including timing, variety selection and tool settings and modification—our results improve dramatically. This year’s organic no-till yields surpassed both our conventional plots and tilled organic fields. One major challenge in this no-till system will be cutworms.

Last year one of our no-till corn fields got hit hard and wiped out from these chewing worms. When we did pre-roll biomass cuts we evaluated for cutworm and we extrapolated that there were from 33,000 to 34,000 cutworms per acre (that's more than one worm per corn plant at our planting rate). As a result of that count at that time I decided to delay rolling and planting. The hairy vetch plots were ready to roll from 19 May to 2 June; we could have rolled and had good kill on the hairy vetch earlier, but the cutworm population was high. The delay let the cutworms mature and develop into moths.

When we went back in after the corn was emerging, we still had some cutworm damage but we also found many moths emerging from the seed furrow slits as we did our counts and examination. Many other moths had already emerged and left. I think in this case the delayed planting let the majority of the cutworms mature to the moth stage where they did not pose a chewing threat to the corn seedlings. This will be a continued challenge for us, will make us carefully consider timing, and will certainly vary from year to year with environmental conditions.