News Feed Forums Soil Health Gaps in the literature! What topic(s) would you like to see explored more? Reply To: Gaps in the literature! What topic(s) would you like to see explored more?

  • Brian Dougherty

    Member
    January 27, 2021 at 12:11 pm
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    Hi Stephen, of the options you listed, there are a lot of research gaps in the use of diverse cover crops in building soil organic matter. It’s basically ‘conventional wisdom’ in the soil health/regen ag community at this point that a multispecies cover crop will provide more soil/ecosystem benefits than a single species. Yet most of the research I’ve seen (I’m in Iowa, midwestern U.S) on multispecies covers finds little/no benefit when it comes to increasing cover crop biomass, improving f:b ratios, increasing SOM, etc. Why is this? Are we measuring the wrong things? Are studies not long enough to detect differences? Are we not taking a systems approach? Or are we just wrong, and multispecies simply does not provide additional benefits or is actually worse in some situations? Would make for an interesting thesis. Good luck!