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Producer Profiles
Peter Kenagy
Albany, Oregon
Peter Kenagy's vegetable rotation offers an annual
window of opportunity to grow cover crops, which he has used to
good effect for 15 years.
Kenagy, who farms just more than 300 acres in Oregon's
fertile Willamette Valley, grows sweet corn, winter wheat, grass
seed and green beans. In between those cash crops, he plants a variety
of cover crops to build the soil and control weeds. Late summer
and fall provide a large window after green beans, for example.
In the ground just 70 days, green beans come off in July or August.
It's a perfect time, Kenagy says, to plant a summer
cover crop like sudangrass, which will grow up to five feet tall
before winter-killing with the first frost. The thick grass mulch
continues to provide a good ground cover when he plants corn into
it in the spring.
"I have a huge gap between one crop and the next,"
says Kenagy, who experiments with strip tillage to lessen his impact
on the soil. "I have to control weeds during that period, which
is just one of a number of things a cover crop does."
Kenagy also uses cover crops because they capture
excess nutrients, containing them from flowing into the adjacent
Willamette River. In addition, the crops catch silt from almost
annual flood waters. In November 1999, for example, he had 100 acres
under water.
"The more cover crop vegetation you have there,
the more silt you catch," he says. "I try to get a lot
of growth before fall."
Kenagy tries different covers to achieve different
goals. He has planted common vetch and crimson clover to fix nitrogen
in the soil and triticale, ryegrass, rape and oats to cut winter
erosion and take up nutrients. The covers help aerate the soil and
counter the effects of compaction.
Some years, he follows beans with oats and dwarf essex
rape planted in August.
"Spring oats grow fast, and I'm shooting to get
as much growth as possible in the fall to have as much coverage
of the ground as possible," he says. At times, he asks a neighbor
to bring in a herd of sheep to graze the oats.
Kenagy's commitment to good soil goes beyond planting
cover crops. He participated in an experiment with Oregon State
University researchers to test a strip-till machine that would disturb
just 6 inches of soil just one-fifth of the soil surface typically
plowed. (For information about strip tillage, also called zone tillage,
see chapter 15.)
The machine cuts slots through vegetative residue,
which Kenagy likes to think mimics a more natural system. Grassland
or forests, he points out, undergo perpetual cycles of accumulating
new residue and undergoing decomposition by soil fauna.
"One of the most abusive things farmers do to
the soil is till it, and most do it repeatedly," he says. "Strip
till does less abuse to the soil, and keeping the residue on top
is a much more natural way for it to be handled."
Kenagy was written up in his local newspaper for his
commitment to forestry on the farm. He grows a mix of walnut, hazelnut,
elderberry and cottonwood trees in a thick 200-foot-wide buffer
along the Willamette River.
Kenagy cuts some of the trees for timber, but retains
a dense hedgerow and riparian area that attracts wildlife and sops
up nutrients to protect the river.
"As a society, we've made much too big a footprint
on the land," he told the Oregon Statesman Journal.
"I think it's time to make it smaller."
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