By Karl Wolfshohl
Progressive Farmer Contributing Editor
There's some irony in the fact that legendary Blues singer Muddy Waters spent his youth at Stovall Farms. Even the proximity of the murky Mississippi River can't cloud the commitment this Clarksdale, Mississippi, plantation has made to conservation and clean water.
Pete Hunter manages the farm for the Stovall family and teams up with his wife, Pam, on their own adjacent Belmont Planting Co. Together, the two farms total 5,000 acres, with about 4,200 acres under cultivation. Hunter spoke of them as a single entity as he outlined the plan to keep sediment out of the Gulf of Mexico.
He knows any runoff that exits the farm is transported straight to the Gulf. An avid coastal fisherman, Hunter sees the results of sediment carried by the Mississippi in the form of a huge mass of water that's too low in oxygen (hypoxic) to support sea life in the northern Gulf.
WATER-QUALITY FOCUS
"I've fished the Florida Keys to Perdido, to Biloxi and all the way around to Calcasieu and Grand Isle, Louisiana," he said. "This has made me acutely aware of hypoxia and the dead zone. Anything I can do to keep nutrients from escaping into the Mississippi River and into the Gulf, I will do." (The "dead zone" is caused by an increase in nutrients in the water, leading to excessive blooms of algae that deplete underwater oxygen levels. Nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural runoff are often cited as the primary culprits.)
The Stovall Farm was founded in the 1830s and was so steeped in cotton that records from a single field showed it had grown the fiber for 154 consecutive years.
"We were wall-to-wall cotton until the grain bubble came along [in 2003-04 here]," Hunter said. "At that point, cotton was not showing a profit, so we moved into corn, soybeans and double-crop wheat and soybeans." Today's cropping pattern still includes these grains in addition to cotton except that Hunter planted no corn in 2016 because he could project no profit in it. The farm has also raised vegetables for The Pictsweet Co., of Bells, Tennessee.
BEST-MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
"To me, soil health involves using cover crops that can benefit the soil, create earthworm activity and cause nutrients and soil to stay in place," Hunter said. "Cover crops also break up the soil, allow water into the subsoil and fracture the soil so it doesn't create a hardpan, all while protecting soil from wind and water erosion."
Delta farmers have access to multiple practices that conserve soil and increase soil health. These are cost-shared through programs sponsored by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and Delta F.A.R.M. (Farmers Advocating Resource Management). Hunter applies several of these practices as crop income allows, with cover crops his primary focus for soil health.
"My long-range goal is to cover every inch of this farm under best-management practices (BMPs), have it sealed with cover crops and do extremely little tillage," this incoming president of the Mississippi Association of Conservation Districts asserts. "I was and still am doing conventional tillage on part of the farm, but I've eliminated two-thirds of it. I've gradually moved to no-till or minimum tillage with cover crops. At the same time, we've installed BMPs as we go. I still have some land that doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but I'm probably four-fifths of the way there."
Severe drought limited Hunter to planting about 1,500 acres of winter cover crops this past fall. He planted three different forage mixes: a winter grazer, oats, Austrian winter peas, crimson clover and radish. Another mix includes cereal rye, oats and crimson clover and still another, cereal rye, crimson clover and radishes. Wheat also serves as a cover, but it isn't terminated specifically for planting a spring crop.
For Hunter, winter cover crops are more than worth their $26-per-acre cost of establishment, including an $8-per-acre mechanical cost. Wheat costs much less.
"I like a mix of cover crops, generally cereal rye, red clover and oats," he said. "I like radishes, too, though I think they're a little overrated, and they're not cheap. I won't use radishes if I'm going to plant corn there. They die and decay, and leave big cavities in the soil. If I no-till corn there, it may not all come up at the same time. With cotton or soybeans, it isn't as important."
Hunter seeds cover crops with ground rigs or by air, and he normally waits until after the fall harvest because the combine on wet ground tears up a cover crop. He often runs a Turbo-Till vertical tillage tool at a precise depth over the field after seeding to uniformly cover the seed and get good soil contact.
"I don't have a problem broadcasting the seed on top of the ground in crop residue early in the fall," he said. "You plant the cover, and it sits there over the winter, then starts growing in mid-February. In our area, cover crops really do their work between mid-February and planting time."
He normally chemically kills the cover with Gramoxone 10 to 14 days ahead of planting. Cutworms are a problem in cotton in the Delta, so he sprays a pyrethroid at planting.
"With these low commodity prices, we're taking on maybe 50 acres at a time to do land forming, putting in underground lines for irrigation, pipes and pads, two-stage ditches, and then adding grid soil sampling and variable-rate fertilizer," he said. "We try to do it all in a field the same year but probably aren't going to get it in a cover crop that first year."
GATHERING POINT
Hunter has a "conservation hot spot" where all conservation practices have been installed on 500 acres. Runoff from 1,500 acres collects in this hot spot. Pipes and pads route irrigation and rainwater from fields through two-stage ditches into a 22-acre tailwater-recovery pond. From this pond, the water is pumped back out to be reused for irrigation.
Scientists from Delta F.A.R.M., the U.S. Geological Survey and Mississippi State University have measured the quality of water draining from this and other similar systems. They have found the systems reduced loads of suspended sediments, phosphorus and nitrogen of 43%, 32% and 44%, respectively, noted Beth Baker, assistant Extension professor in wildlife, fisheries and aquaculture with Mississippi State University. "These reductions, while admirable, don't yet include potential water-quality and soil benefits of the cover crops, for which research is currently under way," she said.
Land forming is done for irrigation efficiency and does temporarily tear up the soil surface. Hunter normally plants corn or grain sorghum the first year after land forming to bring up organic matter levels. That's followed by the cover crop, then corn or grain sorghum the second year.
"If the whole Mississippi drainage basin and its tributaries were planted in cover crops, we would have very little dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico," Hunter said. "It's a tremendous basin. Hypoxia will occur naturally, and some comes from wastewater treatment plants and natural runoff, but it wouldn't be nearly to the extent we have now."
COVER-CROPS FAN
He doesn't have all the answers with cover crops, but his take on them is forthright: "If you want to improve soil health, whether you do land forming or not, planting a cover crop is still one of the cheapest best practices you can do. Even if you forget all the other stuff, plant a cover crop."
All that "other stuff" on his farm includes pipes and pads that hold water to control runoff. The pads are basically low barriers built with land-forming equipment at the bottom ends of furrow-irrigated fields, explained Hunter's crop consultant, Wayne Dulaney, of Dulaney Seed. The pads are fitted with pipes and culverts. Hunter's pads are usually 14 feet wide and are formed about 1 1/2 feet higher than the rest of the fields.
The tailwater pond's ability to catch and store rain and irrigation water, and pump back out for irrigation is substantial in the Delta, which is adding about 50 new irrigation wells per month. This conserves water in addition to cutting the nutrient load of drainage water.
Hunter frequently adds more soil-saving practices as grain and cotton prices allow. He has no specific timeframe nor a formal, written long-term plan.
"It's in my head," he said. "I'm not going to write a plan when I might hit the lottery and finish everything next year. But with these commodity prices, it might take five years."
If McKinley Morganfield (aka Muddy Waters) were still driving tractors at Stovall Farms, he'd undoubtedly croon that conservation has the mojo working.
(ES/BAS)
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