1. Do cover crops improve soil health and enhance nutrient availability to cash crops?

Bare soils are prone to erosion and lose soluble nutrients. Cover crops provide protection to the soil against erosion and nutrient loss. We hypothesized that the cover crops should uptake available nutrients from the soils in the fall when there is no cash crop, assimilate the nutrients in their tissues, and in the following spring, should release the nutrients back to the soil during the next cash crop growing season. In our study, we are quantifying the nutrients taken up by the cover crops... D. Sanyal, A. Rahhal, H. Bielenberg, J. Wolthuizen, J. Clark, A. Bly