Hundreds of major companies and dozens of farmers gathered in downtown Chicago last week for the Regenerative Agriculture Summit. No-Till Innovator Rick Clark gave a presentation about his farm and grabbed the audience’s attention when talking about how he saves millions on inputs with his no-till organic system.  

A big part of that is his use of cover crops. Check out this data, showing the amount of nutrients sequestered by cereal rye that Clark drilled in after corn harvest. There were also 4 or 5 other species in the mix that winterkilled. The numbers keep going up, the longer the rye grows before termination.  

As you can see on this next table — there’s a lot of money in that biomass. Clark calculates $435 worth of nutrients in the 28-inch-tall rye. This is a big reason why he’s going on 6 years without any applied nitrogen (N) and 11 years without any phosphorus (P), potassium (K) or starter fertilizer.

“When you look at a 2 or 3 species cocktail and then you increase that to 10, 12, 14, that’s increasing diversity. Always look to increase diversity. We’ve got 9 crops in rotation, that’s diversity. CUT *7:54-8:00* I’m no longer looking at species-specific cocktails, I’m looking at families of plants for the cocktail. If you were to put together 7 or 8 key specific families, you could raise enough nitrogen (N) to where you wouldn’t need to add synthetic fertilizer.

“I’m over here. We’ve taken everything (inputs) away. The majority of the farming community is over here. Let’s meet right here somewhere in the middle and figure out how to make it work within your context of how far we can cut inputs.”

Clark also looked at the value of legume cocktails ahead of corn, which sequestered $969 worth of NPK in early June. 

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.