Researchers in the Northeast Pursue the Many Benefits of Living Mulches
It’s always lovely to get a call from an old friend. This week I was lucky enough to get one of those calls from Dr. Denise Finney. We got to catch up on all the crazy in our respective lives: kids, consulting with food companies, college teaching, and clover. Clover is a shared passion of ours, which might make more sense when you know we met as graduate students in a nitrogen-focused biogeochemistry lab at Penn State.
Life has taken us beyond the closet-sized office space we shared, and somehow managed to navigate both the tight quarters and completion of our doctoral degree programs with bellies full of babies. Now, we both continue working to advance sustainable agriculture through work with farmers, college students, and research.
Like the fallows that exist between crops of corn and soy that the SFL-PFI project aims to fill with small grains, Dr. Finney recognized an opportunity to fill the fallow rows between vegetable crops. Unlike grain growers, vegetable farmers in the northeast are growing crops with dozens of different planting and harvest dates that make establishment of full-season, full-field style cover cropping very difficult if not impossible, particularly on the limited acreage operations that have expanded most in the Northeast over the past 2 decades.
Dr. Finney and her research partners aim to tackle this challenge another way: through living mulches cultivated between the rows of produce. These mulches could provide many of the benefits of full season cover crops including erosion prevention, weed suppression, and nitrogen fixation. The main challenge, Dr. Finney notes, is successfully managing competition between the main crop and the cover crop. There are new varieties of clover, though, that may mitigate this main concern.
Recognizing this opportunity, Dr. Finney put forth a pre-proposal to NE-SARE, a sustainable agriculture grant-making branch of the USDA, to study some of these new clovers for their potential to fill this niche. Finding success in that phase, she is now putting forward a full proposal to fund this work and form an advisory board to support its successful execution and implementation. Delighted to hear about this, I happily agreed to serve on the project’s advisory board and will be keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll be able to see this through to execution between 2020 and 2023.
