Turning Cover into Cash
Mitchell Hora is a seventh generation farmer on land in southeast Iowa. Here, he’s joined by his father, Brian Hora. Together, the Hora family has implemented multiple regenerative practices on their land.
These practices include planting no-till corn, soybeans, cereal rye, malt barley, mustard and winter wheat, and cover crops. In this video, Mitchell and Brian walk us through one of their unique cropping systems: harvesting standing rye over a growing soybean crop.
- The Horas plant cereal rye in the fall, allowing it to overwinter.
- Instead of terminating in the spring, they plant soybean into the rye and allow the rye to grow to maturity.
- They harvest the mature rye over top of the soybean, giving the soybean more sunlight to grow.
The practice creates an additional cash crop from what is usually a spring-terminated cover crop, providing all the benefits of a winter cover crop along with an additional source of income.
