We are sharing an article by Lincoln Fishman, farmer at Sawyer Farm, about an experiment “to test the viability of intersowing crops directly in established Dutch White clover”. An excerpt: “Sawyer Farm is located in the Hilltowns of Western Massachusetts. We’ve been farming here since 2010. In the early years, an aggressive regime of cover cropping and applications of homemade compost helped build up our soil health. However, the whole farm is on a slope, and, while contoured beds reduced erosion, they didn’t eliminate it. In particular, increasingly intense rain events in the fall (the tail end of hurricanes moving up the coast) were causing visible erosion. These rains were coming in the critical period when fall cover crops were getting established and didn’t provide full soil protection. Still, our cover cropping and manure applications seemed to compensate and soil health improved year over year until 2015 or thereabouts, when we reached a plateau in crop yields and soil health. It took us a while to reach the obvious conclusion: the frequency and intensity of our tillage was causing systemic damage and the cover crops and compost were just our annual apology for the damage we’d done.” The two-part article explains the motivation for this experiment and the results. It is a great read, enjoy! Part 1 Part 2
Growing Vegetables in a Perennial Clover Living Mulch: Part 1
