Fields of winter wheat underseeded with red clover are not a familiar sight in Iowa, but it could become a favored rotation if energy costs continue to rise. Jeremy Singer, a research agronomist with the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA, is looking to find viable crop rotations for the state of Iowa.

"Using winter cereal grains and forage legumes in the rotation could become a more attractive crop system because it has lower inputs," says Singer, who works at the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in Ames. "The rotation does not require pesticides and uses considerably less nitrogen than corn. It could actually reduce costs for a rotation of corn following wheat by reducing the need for nitrogen."

Singer's work has been funded by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at ISU since 2006. An early objective of the project was to find out which kinds of wheat and triticale cereal grains would be best for under-seeding with nitrogen-fixing forage legumes such as of alfalfa and red clover, so that the cereal grain canopy did not prevent establishment of the legumes. Results from this work indicated that the cereal variety did not have a large influence on legume establishment, unless the cereal produced a very high leaf area.

Wheat can serve as cash crop, and cover crop to control erosion

The wheat serves several purposes, both as a cash grain and a cover crop to help control soil erosion. The legumes are cover crops, are green fertilizers that replace nitrogen in the soil needed for growing corn, and make better use of sunlight by creating more vegetation for cattle forage than corn or soybeans on the same piece of ground.

Singer's work is featured in a new on-line video, On the Ground with the Leopold Center. Watch the video.

For more information about cover crops, or Singer's work related to this project, see Iowa State University Extension publication, Intercropping Winter Cereal Grains and Red Clover, PM 2025.