Thanks Brian. There is similar work going on it the UK with Maize, mainly to control soil erosion at and after harvest, which often coincides with wet weather here. Various programs have encouraged maize to be grown on quite unsuitable ground and the erosion + subsequent pollution has been quite bad in some areas. The most successful programmes have involved sowing grass mixes into the growing maize crop approx. 5 weeks after sowing, which has minimised the yield drag, but it does not provide the “perennial” element that I think your project was looking for.

With clover we have found that we can defoliate it with Glyphosate , without killing it, so that the Cash Crop grows away relatively well and the clover then repopulates the understorey. Still very much “Work-in-Progress” though. We find that once established, clover is very resilient to herbicides so it often survives when other problem weeds need to be controlled. I would like to add in some other small leaved legumes to increase the diversity, but I fear they may not be as robust as white clover.