Flail Mowing as a Viable No-till Method of Transitioning from Overwintered Cover Crops to Summer Planted Cucurbits

Commodities

• Vegetables: cucurbits

Practices

• Crop Production: conservation tillage, cover crops, no-till, nutrient cycling
• Soil Management: soil quality/health

We have shifted toward no-till on
our vegetable farm over the past eight years because of its soil
health and production system benefits. The missing piece of the
no-till puzzle has been summer planted crops into overwintered
cover crops. We are able to make cover cropping and no-till work
together  for earlier and later plantings but we have
struggled to find a way to prepare summer planted beds quickly
without tillage since our over wintered cover crops that protect
the soil in spring don’t flower until right when we need to plant
into them. 

Flail mowing could be a great way
to quickly switch from cover crops to summer cash crops, so we
will compare it to our standby bed preparation system,
rototilling, in terms of labor required for bed prep, planting,
and weeding as well as in terms of yield for two summer plantings
that are spaced out by a couple of weeks: zucchini and winter
squash. We will also compare soil health between the two
treatments to see if no-till is beneficial in that regard.

We intend to do outreach about
our results via writing and publishing about the project, as well
as talking to farmers about the project informally and via
workshops or panels, likely in collaboration with American
Farmland Trust.

The two objectives of this project are to determine

1) the farm production system viability of flail mowing
overwintered cover crops in May and planting directly into the
resulting mulch, addressing the following questions:

    a) How does the labor time required for bed
preparation, planting, and weeding compare between flail mowed
beds and rototilled beds?

    b) Are there differences in yield between the two
treatments?

2) whether we can observe soil health benefits of flail mowing vs
rototilling, including soil structure, organic matter, microbial
life, moisture retention, and nutrient analysis. Of course, soil
health benefits are tied to objective number one, because the
healthier the soil the more viable a farm production system
is.