With corn and soybean prices plummeting, and pressure to reduce runoff from fields mounting, some Iowa farmers are turning to oats as a possible solution to both problems, says Harvest Public Media.
Before corn and soybeans covered 95 percent of the crop acreage in Iowa, most farmers included oats or alfalfa in their rotation. But oats don’t command a high price, so “[e]ven with corn and soybean prices at low levels, farmers remain reluctant to give up potentially profitable acres,” says HPM. “But they also recognize that a strict corn-soybean rotation is hard on the soil, and increasingly they’re seeing weeds and pests that persist. A year of planting oats is risky because of the potential for lost income, but it offers others potential benefits, particularly when viewed across several years, not just one.”
Oats are already a popular cover crop. “Giving oats a full season’s go offers farmers a product to sell” and, because oats are harvested well before the corn and soybean rush, would allow for a more diverse cover-crop mix that could fix nitrogen in the soil—keeping it out of the watershed—and reduce the need for fertilizer in the subsequent year’s corn crop.
“Matt Liebman at Iowa State University has studied the impact of oats in the corn-soybean rotation,” says HPM. “He says the sale price of oats can make them look unprofitable, but when they are ‘companion cropped’ with these nitrogen-fixing plants—for example, a year of oats plus a red clover cover crop inserted between soybeans and corn—it’s a lot cheaper to grow corn the following year.”
“The production costs for corn within that whole rotation system can drop substantially,” Liebman says, “so that the overall economics of the rotation are favorable.”