TURKISH AGRI.NEWS

The objectives of summer cover crops are mainly to cover the soil quickly, produce sufficient biomass to feed the soil and avoid the escape of nitrates to the groundwater. For a succesful sorghum cover, several techniques are possible: – direct sowing, very soon after harvest to take advantage of soil moisture, – sowing after stubble cultivation, with a grain drill, – sowing on the fly before harvesting the main crop; however, the successful implementation of sorghum with this technique is very uncertain and often requires increasing sowing rates. Whereas in the first two cases, the recommended sowing rates are 10 to 12 kg per hectare. The good development of the cover will obviously depend on the quality of the sowing, the soil moisture and the rains to come. The development of sorghum requires little water, however its development is still conditioned by rainfall. If there is no rain, the development will be slowed down or stopped and will resume with the first rain...

The assets of sorghum in crop rotations... Let’s take the case of a short rotation, based mainly on winter crops such as rapeseed, wheat and winter barley (a classic rotation in France in the Center, Burgundy or Poitou Charente). In this situation, the introduction of sorghum results in longer rotations. This is because sorghum is a “real” spring crop, which is sown late (mid-May) unlike spring barley or protein pea, which are sown in February. This 3-month time lag disrupts the cycle of grasses such as ryegrass and foxtail, considering that false seedlings grow before sorghum sowing. This reduces the seed stock of the weeds involved. Another advantage of sorghum regarding weeding: the possibility of using herbicides with active ingredients that cannot be used on other rotation crops (rapeseed, wheat or barley), which helps to better manage resistance problems in weeds. Sorghum therefore reduces the IFT (treatment rate index) at the scale of the whole rotation. Sorghum fits perfectly ...