GARDEN CITY Three years ago, rancher and farmer Jay Young got intrigued by a YouTube video.
A North Dakota farmer championed the idea of cover crops plants that would be considered weeds in many other contexts as robust plants for his cattle to graze on.
Young applied the cover crop strategy rotating rye, radishes, turnips, oats and barley to his land just east of the Colorado border. The plants held the soil in place, trapped nutrients in the ground and made the ground nicely spongy.
Partly as a way to prop up farmers who lost crops to flooding this spring, and partly as a way to protect the soil, a federal farm program now offers farmers in 67 flooded Kansas counties from $30 to $45 an acre to put down cover crops.
Meantime, a fledgling private effort is beginning to offer another cover crop bonus: payments intended to capture more carbon in the soil and reduce greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate change.
This spring, heavy rainfall destroyed crops and delayed the planting season throughout the state.
By comparison, some farmers who used cover crops like Young fared relatively well. Less ponding, more absorption. Thats paying off now when he needs to irrigate the land.
If I … use less water because Im utilizing cover crops and capturing more water that is coming out of my sprinklers, he said, then Im being a better steward of the water.
Karen Woodrich, a state conservationist with the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service, said planting cover crops helps restore soil nutrients.
Standing water, it might have killed what was already there and kind of pulled the nutrients right out of those fields, Woodrich said.
Through photosynthesis, plants grab carbon from the air and store it in the soil through their roots.
Every time you till the soil, you actually are releasing carbon back into the atmosphere, said Steve Swaffar, the executive director of the No-Till on the Plains.
If plants continuously cover the ground, the root system creates porous soil. Swaffar says healthy soil resembles cake.
Its full of small holes. It holds together when you hold it in your hand, he said. That allows water to infiltrate down through that soil and then be stored in the soil.
The plowing of cropland crumbles that cake-like dirt. That prevents water from seeping into the ground. Swaffar says once tilled soil dries out, its almost like dust.
