Potato harvest around Park Rapids, Minn., wrapped up last weekend as crews dug the final fields for the 2016 season. The R.D. Offutt Company’s (RDO) Park Rapids Farm covers 9,000 acres of RDO’s potato-producing operation stretching from Baudora to the northern part of the Ponsford prairie in northern Minnesota.
Wayne Warmbold, regional manager for RDO, said crews were limited to half days at times this harvest season due to the warm weather, but overall potato harvest went very well.
A crew finished digging a potato field near Hubbard on last week as Warmbold and agronomist Nick David pointed out some of RDO’s sustainable farming methods implemented on the farm.
RDO continues an effort to scale back on the use of pesticides by implementing practices to best preserve the soil. The company planted about 1,500 acres of a mustard cover crop last year to, among other things, cut down on wind erosion. David said they saw how well mustard worked in the 2015 season and increased to 6,000 acres of the crop this year. Mustard plants are bright yellow and stand out in a field just west of Park Rapids.
Mustard serves as one of the company’s cover crops; the plants will be ground into the field to create a biomass mixture, or “green manure,” which benefits the soil for planting potatoes next spring. Mustard is pungent and suppresses soil-borne insects and pathogens that attack potatoes. Added benefits of planting cover crops like mustard and rye include nutrient cycling in the soil, which leads to less need for pesticide and fertilizer applications. The crop also serves as a pollinator for bees.
“We’re finding a lot of these cover crops can naturally do what some of the chemicals do,” David said.
Rye is planted immediately following potato harvest and quickly germinates. Rye is a strong, deep-rooted plant that survives the winter and acts as wind control on the fields.
“Rye prevents a lot of the nitrogen from leaving the soil and going into the aquifer,” David said. “The better we are at growing the rye crop, the better it is for the aquifer.”
RDO plants peas, which, as David explains, are good for the soil because they create their own nitrogen. It’s an early planted, early harvested crop, and the field is then planted with a green manure cover crop incorporated back into the soil. The short-season crop is part of a crop rotation that also includes corn, wheat and dried beans, along with the potatoes.
“There’s a lot of energy in that green manure,” David said. “It suppresses certain pests and we use that instead of certain chemicals. It’s good to have ground cover for as many months out of the year as possible. The mustard is also good for pollination and a great bee habitat.”
RDO planted 180 acres of wildflower seeds in plots south of Park Rapids to attract pollinators, including monarch butterflies and honey bees as part of a program called Operation Pollinator organized by Syngenta.
According to information provided by the company, RDO sustainability practices have included a reduction in phosphorus use by 40 percent and nitrogen use by 10 percent during recent years at farms in Park Rapids. The adoption of slow-release encapsulated fertilizer (ESN) minimizes leaching on all the company’s Minnesota farms. The use of GPS and machine-controlled precision application techniques reduce field tillage passes by more than 50 percent while also reducing overlap and unnecessary movement of soil. In addition, the newest tillage equipment allows for single-pass seedbed preparation. All irrigation equipment RDO uses across its Minnesota farms utilize drop-down, low-pressure nozzles that use less water and reduce the impact of water lost through evaporation. State-of-art equipment and application methods have also minimized the potential for drift or exposure to any nutrients, irrigation or crop protection applied to fields.
Source: Park Rapids Enterprise