Cover cropping in organic reduced tillage systems: Maximizing soil cover or plant above ground biomass input?

Summary

Abstract Cover crops are grown between two main crops to reduce periods of bare fallow. In highly diverse crop rotations, the lengths of break periods between two main crops vary highly over time and consequently the cover cropping management differs from year to year. Long‐term field trials are thus of limited use because the same cover cropping approach only appears once in several years. This increases the need to better determine the immediate effects of different cover cropping strategies on soil properties. This study evaluated two cover cropping strategies and monitored the temporal development of several soil properties on six fields in Eastern Switzerland in the 9 months period between harvest of winter wheat and sowing of spring crops. The two tested strategies were (a) double co