Benefitting from Buffers and Diversity
All types of farms, fields, and pastures can benefit from plant diversity. While it may not be effective to grow another crop together with soybeans for harvest and production reasons, integrating more diversity in the rotation can break up weed, disease, and insect pest cycles. Many farmers are finding it helps their production to add a third crop to a corn and soybean rotation. Other farmers increase diversity by using cover crops at times when their cash crop isn’t growing. Some farmers are even experimenting with overseeding cover crops into corn or other crops early in the growing season. Adding legumes to grass pastures can pay dividends and some grazers find it works well to have a mix of cool season and warm season pastures, possibly using native warm season grasses in certain pasture rotations. Where perennials pastures aren’t used, such as predominantly row cropped farms, it can be advantageous to incorporate grazing opportunities with cover crops, potentially combined with native grass buffer strips on contours through the field or planted on field borders.
