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Mulligan FARM Profile
Forrest Watson joined his uncle Jeff Mulligan and aunt Lesa Sobolewski on Mulligan Farm in 2006. Together they grow crops, primarily for forage, and manage a 1500-head dairy on 2600 acres in Avon, New York. In 2016, after ten years of observing the significant erosion the cropland was experiencing as major rain events were becoming more frequent, Watson decided that intensive cover cropping might help address it. “My uncle had done some earlier small experiments with oat cover cropping on the farm,” Watson says, "and I had broadcast some oats too, but with little success.”
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In 2015 he had attended the National No-till Conference on the suggestion of a USDA technical advisor, and that following fall after harvesting his corn silage, he planted a cover crop of winter wheat with a newly purchased no-till drill. Since 2016 he has been letting the cover crop grow for longer durations and experimenting with diverse cover crop mixes. He now sows a five species mix of cereal rye, winter peas, crimson clover, kale, a rape hybrid and hairy vetch.
Trials & Errors of Planting Green
Watson’s early attempts at “planting green”—planting a cash crop into a standing or crimped cover crop—were fraught with frustrating trails and errors. “The first year it was a very rainy spring and we could not plant in a timely way,” Watson recalls. “So I ended up planting into very tall green cover, applying herbicide and then rolling what remained of the cover crop flat but with the wrong tool.” He found a better tool the next year and rolled the cover crop down before the planter went through. “In the third year we finally purchased the correct tool and are still using that four years later,” he reports.
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Today, as he continues to finetune his no-till, cover cropping, and planting green practices on a large scale, he is observing the many benefits that have accrued. Cover cropping has enhanced nutrient recapture allowing the farm to significantly reduce the volume of synthetic fertilizer inputs. “Now we can focus on getting manure to as many acres as possible in the spring because we don’t have to spend time on tilling,” Watson says, and can apply it in the fall without fear of runoff. What's more, the mulch created by the terminated cover crop helps suppress weeds, minimize erosion and improve moisture retention. Soil compaction has been virtually eliminated. As Watson reports, “we’re breaking up compaction with roots instead of iron.”
The Challenge of Eliminating Herbicides
Not content with these tangible successes in soil health management, Watson continually strives to further reduce fertilize, fuel, herbicide and pesticide inputs and their associated costs. He now carefully assesses the need to apply pesticide on a season to season basis, applying only if he deems there will be sufficient pest pressure to impact feed crop yields. Although he has succeeded in some seasons and under certain circumstances to entirely avoid applying herbicides to control weeds and to terminate cover crops after crimping, he reports it's unlikely he will be able to totally eliminate their use. “I wanted to prove we could do it, and it does work when the conditions are right,” he says, but those conditions have been the exception rather than the rule.
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Planting green into a cover crop without using an herbicide to terminate can be problematic and risky for a number of reasons, Watson says. To eliminate herbicides spring planting must be delayed to allow the cover crop to reach a stage of growth optimal for termination solely with a roller crimp. In eight out of ten years, Watson reports, that means “we need to wait to plant 2 to 3 weeks later than we otherwise would.” During that time the cover crop continues to draw water from the soil, compromising the growth of the cash crop. Depending on how little rainfall has fallen in a given season, that could translate into as much as a 60 to 70 percent loss in crop yield. “We operate on a very limited amount of acreage available to us to feed our herd,” Watson says. “If we experienced a drastic reduction in yield because we eliminated herbicides completely from our system that would mean we would be buying feed from someone or we would have to reduce the size of our herd. Either way it would impact profits.”
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Delaying spring planting green without herbicides also tends to disrupt the farm’s rotation cycle, and that delay can also reduce yields and create weed challenges. “Let’s say on a certain field we would normally be planting on May 20 or 25,” Watson explains. “If we wait until the cover crop is mature enough to terminate without herbicide that could be as late as June 10. That means given our harvest window we would need to plant a shorter maturity silage corn.” Because shorter maturity hybrids typically yield less, the productivity of those acres will be compromised.
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I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
If instead Watson elects to plant the longer maturity corn, that harvest is also delayed, and, in turn, the next cover crop planting date. That next cover crop will be too short to terminate effectively with a roller crimper and will create less mulch coverage, giving an opportunity for weeds to proliferate. “Then you have another problem of later season weed pressure that often goes to seed and continues on until you have a really big weed issue,” Watson says.
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The alternative might be to address the weeds by tilling, as many organic farmers do, and as Mulligan Farm did previous to adopting no-till. But Watson tries when at all possible to avoid it. He maintains that tilling can actually promote weed growth as it turns up weed seeds that might otherwise have remained buried. “If you till the weed seeds are going to grow faster,” he says. Tilling also exposes bare soil to the vagaries of weather. “I hate having ground open with nothing growing on it,” Watson says. “We are having 100 year rain events every 10 years these days. Any disturbance in soil breaks the soil structure down in a way that the soil doesn’t respirate and crusts more easily when it rains. Your field will wash away if you give it the opportunity. And top soil can’t be replaced, in our lifetime or even in humanity’s lifetime, if it goes to the bottom of a river or lake. Our soils are degraded now because all that tillage that was going on for a couple hundred years made them more erodible and less productive without fertilizer.”​Watson takes the view that selective application of herbicide is less disruptive to the soil than tilling. “Tillage releases carbon, uses fuel, disrupts populations of insects and fungi in your soil, and it creates a huge erosion issue. With herbicide you need very little fuel to apply it. If I can reduce the amount of herbicide and still no-till our crops I feel that is a more positive route. I have settled on planting green and crimping and using herbicide afterward. In wet or dry years it is the stable, dependable method for us.”​Mulligan Farm has succeeded in gradually reducing use of herbicides thanks largely to the weed suppressing benefits of cover cropping. “A really dense cover crop that is roller crimped later in the spring can potentially receive a lighter dose of herbicide or none on some parts of the field,” he reports. “I have our crop scouts identifying areas of fields that need additional herbicide applications rather than whole fields. Often the edges and ends grow more weeds due to a less dense cover crop and more machinery compaction.”
What Needs to Change in the Farm Economy
Speaking about the broader farm economy, Watson sees a lot that needs to be set right. Watson regrets that Mulligan’s farming model, integrating livestock and cropping, has virtually vanished from the American landscape. “Manure is part of our fertility plan,” he says. ““When people say cows are bad for the environment, well having no cows and only farming soy and corn is worse,” he says. “Maybe cows produce more methane but they also produce manure and using only synthetic fertilizer for your crops because you don’t have the natural manure is probably worse. Your land may not have livestock but if it is overapplied with synthetics it is not as productive. There are a lot of farms that don’t see manure at all.” The irony, he says, is “we have huge commodity farms in essence growing crops to feed cattle that are on someone else’s farm.”
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He also believes that the way commodity farming is conducted on a grand scale--with soybeans and corn the only crops in constant rotation—is not beneficial to the soil. “There would be some improvement if commodity farming was more diverse, so that a more diverse rotation could be introduced." That diversity would afford farmers the flexibility to rotate crops of varying maturity to accommodate the varying time frames required to optimize cover crop termination by roller crimping. While he admits it would require a lot of changes in infrastructure and marketing systems to make a more diversified cropping system truly viable, “theoretically it would mean less use of herbicides.” Unfortunately, he says, “there aren’t a ton of people eating barley or rye or buckwheat these days.” What's more even if there were, Mulligan Farm might not be able to integrate more diversity into its cropping system. “As a dairy farm we need to feed our cows so we need to plant for silage, which limits what we can grow,” Watson explains.
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Nonetheless, Watson does have confidence that if synthetic herbicides were suddenly banned, Mulligan Farm would be prepared for it. “If that is the route society wants to take I am ok with that," he says. "Our overall yields would be reduced but we could still grow crops." But, he maintains, if farms like his were to survive after an herbicide ban, the consequences would be higher food costs. “It would take more acreage to achieve a given yield," he explains, "and farms still need to be able to function and be profitable.”
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No matter the dictates passed down to farmers by regulators, there will always be unforeseen challenges and adapting to change is a farmer’s way of life. “The weather is ever changing and we are always looking to find ways to adapt to it,” Watson says. “We are all trying to find a better way to farm in an intricate system.”
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