The use of intercrops is a very important part of rational management of soil resources. We will give you the general characteristics of intercrops and what crop and when to sow for intercrops in a separate article. Today we assume that most farms have already sown a few months ago a catch crop and the time has come to eliminate it. When and how to liquidate the catch crop? We will try to answer this question in today’s article. By sowing a catch crop, we hope to get as much green matter as possible, which is very necessary in the formation of humus. The larger the catch crop, the more mass. In the case of the plowing system, plowing the catch crop “all at once” is often no small problem. The liquidation of the catch crop is therefore based on shredding it as thoroughly as possible. Smaller plant parts undergo a much faster mineralization process, i.e. the release of nutrients and the building of humus.
When to liquidate a catch crop?
When to liquidate a catch crop is mainly determined by when it was sown, what plants were used and for what purpose we sowed it. When sowing a catch crop as a so-called “green manure”, we should liquidate it just before flowering or shortly after it begins. It is not a well-known fact that the plant extracts the most nutrients from the soil during flowering. By destroying the plant before flowering, we make most of the nutrients stay in the soil and the green aboveground mass forms a natural fertilizer for us, thus building humus and breaking the crop rotation in cereal monoculture. Another way to use a catch crop is to leave it in the field longer in order to pull nutrients from the deeper layers of the soil that are not accessible to, for example, cereals. An excellent example of a crop sown to release nutrients is oil radish (plowshare). Thanks to its strongly developed root system, it is able to pull us nutrients from as deep as 1.5 meters acting like a natural subsoiler. Leaving the catch crop longer in the field also makes the above-ground parts of the plants harder, more woody. This happens, for example, in the case of phacelia.The woody parts of plants are an excellent source of cellulose, the main building block of the humus layer. In the end, however, it is nature that decides whether a catch crop will release components from our soil or serve to build humus. Nevertheless, remember to eradicate the catch crop before the seeds are produced, otherwise you may have weed problems later.
How to liquidate the catch crop? Machines for the liquidation of the catch crop
As we mentioned earlier, the liquidation of the intercrop involves grinding it as thoroughly as possible. For this purpose we can use, for example, a disc harrow. AGROLAND’s TITANUM HEAVY and STANDARD series of disc harrows equipped with 560 and 630 mm diameter toothed discs will work very well for this purpose. AGROLAND also offers the BORAZON disc harrow on a running system with wheels in the center, which can be optionally equipped with a mulcher (cutting roller) in front of the first row of discs. Thanks to this solution, the catch crop is already pre-broken, as a result of which the discs are much easier to work. In case you do not want to use a disc harrow, the MULCZER AGROLAND FRONT PWN may be a good solution. This machine is characterized by a low power requirement for the work it performs so that we can work with it on the front TUZ while having another machine fastened to the rear of the tractor. This solution is especially recommended for no-till farming. We can perform 2 activities at the same time, much faster preparing the field for the next sowing.
