Cover Crops
GOAL:
The project goal had two parts, first to educate the public on areas of improvement in agricultural
conservation practices in Tippecanoe County over the last five years and areas where
improvement is still necessary. Second to educate the public on invasive species in Tippecanoe
County, and the effect of invasives on ag production.
Community Project Partner:
Sarah Vaughn and Kris Gertz from the Tippecanoe County Soil and Water Conservation District.
Team members
- Emily Andrews
- Kendall Daniels
- Caitlyn Graves
- Renee Hallstein
Summary:
The needs of this project are to educate the public on where improvements have been made over the years and where conservation efforts need more attention. To perform these tasks, we analyzed five years of cover crop and tillage practice data and two years of invasive species data. The deliverables for this project include six cover crop maps, six tillage practice maps, two invasive species maps, 50 yearly figures for cover crop and tillage, four summary figures, and an educational slide presentation. We found that five years of data is not necessarily enough information to suggest a trend. Between the years, as the maps show, there are high amounts of variation for both cover crop and no-till presence. Cover crop acreage can vary due to corn and soybean rotation, individual farmer economics, and weather. As for no-till, we know that 2018 was particularly high, on average the number is expected to be within 50-60% for corn and soybean. Excluding 2018, the rest of the years are within a typical range. Tillage can differ due to farmer preference and their tillage rotational practices. We suggest that data is continued to be taken, and uploaded regularly into an organized Excel that can be uploaded into GIS. More years of data, perhaps 15-20 would be better for suggesting overall trends. As for invasive species, 2 years of data is too limited to reach any conclusions on the correlation to cover crops. Future analysis of cover crops and invasive species should be possible with more years of data.