GREENWOOD, Ind. — Travel the back roads of Johnson County and you may see green this season instead of the brown residue of cornstalks and stubble. The county increased its acreage of cover crops from 120 last year to 1,000 this year, a trend playing out across the Midwest.

And no one could be happier than agronomist Dave Robison. “We’re really excited about what is happening in the state with cover crops,” he said. “A big reason for that is the push from NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) and SWCD (Soil and Water Conservation Districts) for building soil and clean water.”

Robison is a founding member of the Midwest Cover Crop Council and agronomist for CISCO Seed. He travels the Midwest speaking for cover crops and overseeing field trials in five states, and spreads enthusiasm on his blog at www.plantcovercrops.com which receives more than 5,000 hits per month from around the world.

“The interest is huge, but mostly in the Midwest,” Robison said. “I believe cover crops can be the biggest transformation of agriculture since biotech seed technology.”

Cover crops are proven to reduce erosion and compaction, produce and scavenge nitrogen and increase earthworm populations, as well as provide fall forage for livestock. Earthworms enhance soil aeration, nutrient recycling and soil percolation.

As producers look to lower input costs in the shadow of high fertilizer prices, the advantages for cover crops can be huge.

Robinson’s brother, Don, is vice president of sales at CISCO and is owner of Robison Farms in Greenwood where a field day was last week for public officials, ag industry leaders and farmers. Test plots covered 1,100 lineal feet of radishes, turnips, crimson clover, oats, winter rye, annual ryegrass, Austrian winter peas and several mixes of those species.

Cover crops are not new to agriculture, but were displaced by new methods of fertilization and soil care. The men’s father, Bob, planted cover crops in the 1940s and began no-tilling around 1955.

“It’s nothing new; they were planting cover crops back in the ’30s, so it’s like ‘back to the future,’” Don said. “Then, fertilizer was cheap and easy to get; now it is expensive.”

He believes with so many environmental problems surfacing, farmers must look toward mandated soil and water cleanliness, and keeping nutrients in the field. “We won’t have issues if we get ahead,” he said.

Indiana Director of Agriculture Joe Kelsay, who plants cover crops on his farm nearby, talked of the concern for New Orleans’ hypoxic (low-oxygen) zone, where runoff from sewage, urban land use and fertilizers contributes to fish kills. Being proactive means less intervention from the regulatory system, he said.

“We have important roles to play in these concepts,” he said. “Agriculture is very interested in doing what they can to reduce nutrients leaving the state. The cover crop idea is to hold nutrients in our fields, out of our creek, and not moving down the river to Mississippi.”

Barry Fisher, NRCS agronomist, said Indiana has a unique situation: A coalition of state agencies, private industry and farmers working together to promote the benefits of cover crops and advance their use. He said much was learned from the early days of no-till and now a system is in place where a producer not only expects no yield loss, but in fact can expect a yield gain from using conservation cropping systems.

“The carbon and nitrogen cycles need to be on balanced cycles,” Fisher said. “We need to grow and sequester as much carbon as we remove or burn.”

He noted the yields required to meet world demand by 2030: 300 bushels of corn and 100 bushels of soybeans per acre. Technology has come a long way in meeting that goal.

“If we add soil health to our equation, we’ll get to that,” he said. “It doesn’t happen overnight and the details are critical. If we want to go further, we have to master the details.”