Sometimes it would take and sometimes it wouldn’t,” Sommers said. We started with our first cover crops spreading by air with rye grass into a standing crop. “Early on we tried a lot of things that did not work very well. Sommers advises that growers new to cover crops be patient and try different things to find what works for their operation. We also use swine manure and the cover crops help capture the nutrients and hold them until the next growing season.” That is one of the things that we are trying to do with these cover crops. “There is a theory I like that focuses on feeding what’s living underneath the soil. We include deep rooted species like radish and spreading roots species like rye, wheat and oats, and we also have clover to add nitrogen,” Sommers said. Sommers feels that cover crops help protect the soils from run-off and build up organic matter to manage the water. We have some areas that we have gotten zero yield in the past,” Sommers said. One of the big problems we have in this area is that if it stops raining in the summer and gets hot and dry, it hurts the crops. We mainly have Fox and Lippincott soils on the farm. We can get the crop in early since the soil will warm up and dry out with the black color and natural drainage. “These soils are naturally well drained and in a wet year can yield very well. They do not have a need for subsurface tile drainage. The soils that Sommers farms are fertile and black but with gravel underneath. It does not have a lot of surface runoff going into it. Since it is spring-fed, the Mad River is unique in that it provides a cold-water habitat that supports trout. Mark IV Farm is located in the Mad River watershed which feeds into the Miami River and on into the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. “Once we got started, we realized that there were a lot of other benefits to planting cover crops.” That is where we got started with cover crops, because we were concerned about erosion and also nutrient uptake as we are relatively close to the intake for the Urbana city water supply,” he said. Here on this farm where we live, the slope is mostly 2% to 6%. “We have a farm that we rent that we call ‘the mountain farm’ that has up to 12% slopes. The topography of Champaign County makes much of the farmland a candidate for no-till and cover cropping practices. We started looking at cover crops in 2012 and now have 100% of our acres with cover crops as well.” My dad had started to no-till in 1983 and by 1995 we had converted everything to no-till. “I retired from OSU Extension, and one of the things we were trying when I was the agriculture agent in the 1980s was to encourage area farmers to try no-till. We have also been planting a lot of cover crops lately to learn more about how they help improve the soil,” Sommers said. “I started farming full time in 1995, and we have been 100% no-till ever since then. The farm consists of approximately 750 acres of corn and soybeans along with some wheat and hay production. Mark IV Farm is named after Jack’s son, Mark, who was killed in an accident, and includes Jack and his wife, along with his other son and daughter-in-law. It was only this past summer that Jack and his family sold the last of the sows and transitioned to strictly grain crop production. Over the years, the farm has had a diverse mix of livestock, with pigs being one of the constants. Jack Sommers still lives in the farmhouse that his grandfather lived in when he purchased the farm over 90 years ago. Since the 1930s, the Sommer’s family has been farming the rolling fields of Champaign County, Ohio.
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