by Dr. Calvin Trostle, Extension Agronomy, TAMU Soil & Crop Sciences, Lubbock, (806) 723-8432, ctrostle@ag.tamu.edu This week I was in Mitchell County, Texas to talk about cover cropping (see companion article in this month’s RCNL).  As cover cropping has become a national topic of interest in agriculture, sometimes I think the interest and enthusiasm gets carried away with some statements about soil and our farming practices that need some perspective. This could very well be purely unintentional.  But if a Texas farmer is lectured about any of the… Read More →

by Dr. Clark Neely, Statewide Small Grains Extension Specialist, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension In Texas, we talk a lot about wheat, but oats deserves some attention as well. After all, they were planted on 470,000 acres across the state last year. This small grain is particularly well adapted to Central and South Texas and generally tolerates wet soil better than wheat, which is a reoccurring issue in the Blacklands and South Texas.  The primary use of oats in Texas is for forage and grazing, with only about 50,000… Read More →

by Dr. Calvin Trostle, Extension Agronomy, TAMU Soil & Crop Sciences, Lubbock, (806) 723-8432, ctrostle@ag.tamu.edu Producers across Texas are becoming more familiar with the concepts of cover cropping.  More farmers are asking about it, and some are trying cover cropping in some form.  Cover cropping across the U.S. and even in Texas takes many forms (Fig. 1). In the Texas South Plains (general Lubbock region) we have over 1 million acres of cover cropping annually—the use of terminated rye or wheat to protect seedling cotton, mostly on irrigated… Read More →