Tillage radishes long on soil penetration

By DEAN SHIPLEY

dshipley@madison-press.com

Whoa! Those are some radishes. White, thick, with tall leafy green tops, these are radishes which look to be on steroids.

Rodger Baker of Madi­son County dis­plays tillage radishes used to break up soil in a more eco-friendly way than machin­ery. They were grown by farmer Audie Howard as an alter­na­tive to using machin­ery. (Photo by Dean Shipley)

But they’re not. They’re called tillage radishes and can grow up (make that down) to 20 inches in length. While some of that length pro­trudes above ground, the rest of it thrusts its way into the earth.

That’s what they’re sup­posed to do: push, plunge, pro­pel their way down into terra firma. That growing-to-new-depths action is a nat­ural, eco-friendly way for farm­ers to till their soil with­out using a mega-ton trac­tor and tiller to accom­plish the same task.

That’s just what Madi­son County farmer Audie Howard wanted to avoid when in 2011 he sowed the radishes and Aus­tralia peas into 200 acres in Union Town­ship. That trac­tor and imple­ment com­pact the soil as they course over it. When it comes to soil prep, com­paction is not the farmer’s best friend.

So when the county soil and water con­ser­va­tion office put forth a pro­gram to pro­mote cover crops, Howard thought he’d give it a try. He said he had also read about it in a farm pub­li­ca­tion. The radishes were sown along with Aus­tralian peas—sown to ben­e­fit the radishes—on 200 acres in Union Town­ship. Julia Cum­ming, direc­tor, said the dis­trict encour­ages farm­ers to use envi­ron­men­tally friendly means of accom­plish­ing a task and reduce any amount of car­bon foot­print trod by a diesel-fuel burn­ing tractor.

“We have pro­grams that pro­mote cover crops,” Cum­ming said. We have incen­tives, the envi­ron­men­tal qual­ity incen­tive pro­gram. If farmer want to try cover crop, he would apply to and we give them an incen­tive pay­ment to try it,” Cum­ming said. “They have to try it.”

Howard was not part of the incen­tive pro­gram, but tried it “on my own.”

The radishes per­formed as expected.

“It breaks up the ground with­out machin­ery doing it,” Howard said. “As big as they are, they heave the ground.”

While the radish is heav­ing the ground, the pea plants, which are legumes, are infus­ing the soil with nitro­gen Howard said.

Howard har­vested nei­ther crop, but left them in the ground to decay, giv­ing the earth addi­tional organic matter.

To plant growth, that matters.

Fol­low­ing the till­ing radishes decay, Howard planted corn on the field. Despite the drought, the corn, while dimin­ished by the lack of rain, grew well.

He said the tillage radish “exper­i­ment” was worthwhile.

In other fields at the end of the grow­ing sea­son Howard revived a method of replen­ish­ing the fields from long ago: he sowed rye as a cover crop.

(Dean Ship­ley is a staff writer for the Madi­son Press.)

Posted by Tina Murdock on Jan 10 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.