Sometimes first impressions are all wrong. Anyone driving Wisconsin Highway 80 in Iowa County in spring 2024 might be forgiven for thinking "ugly" while driving past one of Tom Novak’s cover cropped fields.
"It looked like a big mess," Tom recalled.
But on December 16th he received a call informing him that he'd won the "planting green" category of the 2024 Wisconsin Soybean Yield Contest with his entry of 85.22 bushels per acre with LG Seeds LGS2054XF.
"It was a 6-acre field that I'd planted green with a big 2023 cover crop of oats, Sudan grass, radishes, turnips, and winter peas," Tom explained. That field had been insulated over the winter by snow such that the radishes and turnips, which had tubers underground as reserves, withstood a spring application of herbicide and grew tall flowers.

Tom is an active producer-member of the Uplands Watershed Group, as well as a collaborator in the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute's project the Wisconsin Cover Crop Data Network.
Despite the vigorous growth and flowering of the cover crops, Tom said he knew he had a good stand of soybeans underneath. He entered the field in the Wisconsin Soybean Yield Contest. With spring and early summer rains, the cover crops died back and the soybeans took over and looked tremendous.
Soil erosion in hilly Iowa County is a big problem and Tom relies on cover crops to help him with water infiltration and erosion control. So, even if they are occasionally a little wild looking, cover crops helped keep his soil in place during heavy rains in the spring and during the dry months later in the year.
Learn more about how farmers are bucking ideas of what a tidy field "should" look like in favor of strong, protected soils at michaelfields.org/covercrops.
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