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Walhalla, ND.

I'm moving my AG growing operations a couple miles from my current location. After what happened to my ags this year it's time to move to a more secure location. The ground ended a 15 year CRP 2 years ago which mostly consists of grassland. The soil is sandy loam. I was hoping to have it tilled by now but the snow came too soon. Other than soil test does anyone have suggestions?
Thanks

11/2/2017 9:22:54 PM

Anamosa, IA BPIowegian@aol.com

Did you clear it with FSA and NRCS? I know of one person who turned some CRP into a big asparagus patch and had to repay a bunch of money. (I worked for SCS-NRCS from 1983 to 2013)

Was it a pure grass stand, mixed grasses and legumes, native or introduced species? If you have some deep rooted prairie grasses or alfalfa established, it might be hard to knock them down with just tillage. And if it is sandy and you till it a bunch, you might really dry out the soil. And North Dakota gets less rain than we get here in eastern Iowa. Sandy soil usually has very low OM content due to particle size and more oxygen in the soil to help the bacteria that eat up OM. Tillage speeds up the loss of OM.

If it has a lot of grass cover on it, you might want to consider mowing it off just as soon as you can or even burning it so the soil warms up quicker. Burning leaves the black residue on the soil, a form of biochar. Just be careful that you don't set the whole CRP on fire unless that is a mid-contract management option. I would then consider using glyphosate (Roundup) to kill the grass that comes up and its roots, and keep tillage to a minimum. And I would be looking for sources of compost or aged manure to bring up the OM. I would use tillage to incorporate OM an other fertilizers and catch any weeds that escape the glyphosate. I would not rely on glyphosate every year, as you could develop resistant weeds.

11/3/2017 12:20:00 AM

Walhalla, ND.

Thanks Iowegian
When the 10 Acres was purchased in 2004 the county sent notice asking if anything was going to be constructed on said land. The letter stated that said land was in CRP till the year 2007 and if anything were to be done to it money would have to be paid for the remainder of the CRP. That timeframe has long passed and is no longer in the program. It consists mostly of natural native grass. During the program the rules were to spray for broadleaf weeds every year. So it's pretty much free of any weeds, it's just grassland. Where I'm at now I had problems with low om and low boron etc because of the sand in the soil and the leaching of nutrients. In this area of North Dakota we get a fair amount of precipitation annually.

11/3/2017 6:35:41 AM

Anamosa, IA BPIowegian@aol.com

The good thing about native grass is that it is real deep rooted and pulls nutrients up from deep in the subsoil. I thought it had just been CRP for 2 years, but in the length of time you stated, you probably have a real great prairie stand.

What we learned from ground coming out of CRP is that if the farmer plowed it, he could destroy 10 years of OM gains in one year. It is easy to kill prairie grass with moldboard plow. If you just use a rototiller, you will have problems. We encouraged farmers that were returning CRP to crop production to mow their grass after the nesting season the last year of the contract to encourage new, quick growth. Then when the contract expired on October 1, spray with glyphosate and let winter help kill it. It might take one more spring spray, but then they could notill and save the OM. We recommended soybeans the first year, usually roundup ready to really knock out all the competition. And it helped to add a little nitrogen fertilizer, even though soybeans are a legume, because all of the old plant material in and on the soil would tie up a lot of N. You probably be prepared to make some split applications of N to help replace what the old grass ties up and prevent too much from leaching through the sand. Your second year should be even better than the first, with all of the OM starting to release the N it had tied up. We saw that the notill corn on the second year following CRP would be fantastic.

11/3/2017 8:53:37 AM