Rick Clark talked about the value of cover crops at the beginning of the show, but what about the value of all that corn and soybean residue after harvest? Dave Stark, president of Agriculture at Holganix, breaks it down for us.

“Every 40 bushels of corn produces about a 1 ton of stover. In that ton, you’ve got 17 pounds of nitrogen, about 4 pounds of phosphorus, 34 pounds of potassium and some sulfur. Do the math — If you have a 200-bushel-per acre corn crop, 5 tons of residue. You’ve got a lot of nutrients out there you’ve already bought. You’ve got to return it to the soil. You want the carbon in the soil. You want the nutrients in the soil. None of that happens without microbes breaking it down and releasing these nutrients so next year’s crop can take advantage of it.”  

That was from a recent No-Till Farmer webinar, which you can check out on No-TillFarmer.com. One of Dave’s favorite quotes is — “Plants farm microbes because microbes mine the soil.”

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