Cover Crops as a Conservation Approach: What Dairy Farmers Need for its Adoption

This award is for Virginia Tech to document, demonstrate and educate dairy farmers and conservation professionals about the benefits of utilizing cover crops in their farming systems. Despite the well-established benefits of cover crops, dairy farmers can be reluctant to adopt the use of cover crops in their rotations. One reason for this lack of adoption is related to the limited existing information on yield and quality of the resulting forages. The overall objective of this project is to obtain local information related to productivity and nutritional quality of different cover crops. The specific objectives of this project are to determine: dry matter yield and nutritional quality of 15 diverse cover crops destined for silage or grazing and the residual effect of cover crops on dry matter yield and nutritional quality of forage sorghum and corn destined for silage.