Using Living Aisles and No-Till Planting Strips to Mitigate the Impacts of Intense Rain Events on Organic Vegetable Farms

View the project final report

Commodities

• Vegetables: broccoli, peppers

Practices

• Crop Production: cover crops
• Pest Management: mulches - killed, mulches - living

The effects of climate change are being felt on organic vegetable farms in the upper Midwest. Bigger and more frequent rain events cause erosion, delay planting, and hamper weed control. This project explored using living aisles and no-till planting strips to mitigate the impacts of intense rains linked to climate change. Both practices are known to reduce erosion, improve soil permeability, and increase soil quality, making them logical choices for resilient farming systems. However, concerns about reduced yield, increased labor, and overall weed control mean that neither practice is commonly used on organic vegetable farms. This project was designed to address farmers’ concerns and develop no-till techniques that can be incorporated into diversified vegetable systems.

Clover aisles were established in fall in order to improve weed control through two cropping years.  Winter-killed oats and peas established in the planting strips were intended to provide an in-situ mulch to be planted without tillage (even when the ground is wet).  Three treatments were compared:1) tillage immediately prior to planting, 2) no-till planting into undisturbed oat/pea residue after occultation, and 3) no-till planting into undisturbed oat/pea residue and black landscape fabric mulch.  These three treatments all included living clover aisles and were compared to a conventionally tilled control without living aisles.  Transplanted broccoli and peppers were used as the vegetable crops and were rotated in the second cropping season.

Due to two seasons of unsuccessful broccoli production, a pause in the research during the COVID pandemic, a badly timed broken tiller, and a late frost, only one year of pepper yield data could be analyzed.  That analysis showed that the control had higher pepper yields than the three treatments with living aisles.  Further, the labor data indicated that mulching with landscape fabric can be efficient with longer season crops like peppers, but not with shorter season crops like spring broccoli, and that using occultation as a bed prep method for no-till planting was the least labor efficient of the methods trialed.  

• Assess the effectiveness of three planting strip treatments between living clover aisles
• Evaluate yields and management costs of living aisle/planting strip treatments as compared to open ground/conventionally-tilled control
• Share information with growers through a field day (expected attendance 35 to 40)
• Create an illustrated info sheet and video with results and recommendations to be posted on the FairShare website and social media accounts, disseminated through our farmer database (280 contacts), and made available at the annual Organic Vegetable Production Conference (expected attendance over 200)
• Contribute information to the development of longer, multi-year, reduced-tillage vegetable rotations