Rye revival

Using winter rye in his crop rotation has freed farmer Sandy Syburg from a chore he never much enjoyed: spreading poultry litter. His biologically active soil now generates enough nitrogen that he no longer needs to import additional fertility onto his farm.

Syburg, whose farm has been certified organic since the late 1980s, manages about 1,200 acres in Oconomowoc, a town in southeastern Wisconsin, about 35 miles west of Lake Michigan. He shared his story of using rye and clover to produce nitrogen at a Maine Grain Alliance meeting made possible with support from the USDA Transition to Organic Partnership Program.

For a long time, Syburg followed a seven-year cropping rotation of corn, buckwheat, dry beans, rye or clover, sunflowers, peas or alfalfa and finally vetch. The crop diversity was great for fickle markets, but he was dependent on the conventional poultry litter. When he eventually shifted to a two-year crop rotation of corn and rye/red clover, he was able to stop writing checks to the chicken barn.

Half of Syburg’s land is in rye/clover and half in corn each year. He harvests the corn crop in late autumn, so late that sometimes, he said, there is snow on the ground. Then, using a fertilizer cart, he broadcasts winter rye seed at 70 – 120 lbs./acre and works the seed in lightly with a speed till.

The seeding rate varies depending on when he plants. If he plants earlier, the rye has an opportunity to tiller, but with later plantings it does not. The goal is for the rye to not get too thick partly because if it does, the stems will be smaller and it will be more susceptible to lodging.

“The main reason, though, is we want the rye crop to be sufficient to get the yield we want/need but also not so heavy that it shades out the clover. In this system the desired outcome is a robust clover crop,” said Syburg.

The rye seeding density doesn’t yield the highest crop, but the density of the canopy lets in enough sunlight for the clover crop that will grow the following season. Come late February or early March, he frost seeds 15 lbs. of red clover seed per acre on the surface.

Syburg said, “We utilize the freeze/thaw cycles in that very early spring to pull that clover seed into the soil.”

Mammoth red clover is his preferred variety because of its winter hardiness.

He combines the rye crop in summer, then mows the stubble and clover to manage straw residue and invigorate the clover. Another reason he likes Mammoth red clover is because he can manage it with a single cut.

“We only have to do that once in the fall, where with the medium reds, you’d be looking at probably cutting it three weeks after rye harvest and then again before winter,” he said.

Mowing also eliminates any volunteer rye plants and any weeds that may have escaped before they go to seed.

The following spring, Syburg makes two passes with a 31-foot speed disk and plants the corn crop. He runs camera-guided European cultivators equipped with optical sensors and hydraulic side-shift hitches that automatically steer the cultivator between crop rows and believes the technology improves yields. “We get really good weed management with those European-style cultivators,” he said.

Rye yields are typically 40 – 50 bushels/acre and corn about 170 bushels/acre. The biologically active system also yields nitrogen – about 400 lbs./acre, said Syburg.

Much of the credit goes to the rye, which, according to Syburg, has over 17,000 miles of roots per plant if you include the main roots and root hairs. “So there’s a tremendous amount of this interaction between the plant and the soil,” he said.

Not all 400 lbs./acre of nitrogen are available to the next crop, however. Syburg said 25% of the nitrogen is in a soluble, readily available form, another 25% is in a slow-release form and 50% goes into the soil’s nitrogen bank.

Some might criticize Syburg’s use of tillage to produce this nitrogen, but he pushes back against the no-till conventional farming model, which claims there’s a tremendous benefit to leaving soil undisturbed. In Syburg’s experience, a no-till, chemical-intensive corn/soybean rotation creates severe compaction and allows very little water to infiltrate.

He has firsthand experience transitioning conventional no-till corn/soybean ground into a biologically active system with the help of rye. To illustrate, he shared an anecdote: He was pulling a seven-shank ripper with a 550 hp tractor, and sometimes the tractor would come to a complete stop as it tried to pull itself through the compacted soil. After three years of his corn and rye/clover rotation, the changes to the compacted soil were dramatic; the water infiltration increased from 4.9 inches per year to 49 inches per year.

Syburg believes his cropping and tillage systems are advantageous compared to conventional no-till systems because of benefits – nitrogen production, water infiltration, active soil biology and increased organic matter.

He also pointed out, “We’re never really disturbing the soil without either a living plant there like the clover or high residues. But it also still gives us 18 months of zero soil disturbance from the time we plant the rye in the fall, and frost seed to clover the following spring, then harvest rye in July and not till until planting corn the following spring.”

According to Syburg, about 100 years ago, the U.S. produced about 76 million bushels of rye. Currently, the U.S. is utilizing about 22 million bushels of rye, 13 million of which are imported from Canada – meaning the U.S. now imports more rye than it grows domestically.

Syburg thinks that growing these 13 million bushels domestically would be a great opportunity for U.S. farmers to add value to their farm enterprises while diversifying their rotations.

Because of its value of ease to grow, ability to produce a crop on low inputs, deep roots and its ability to foster a clover crop as a nitrogen source, he’s especially keen on organic corn farmers taking up the rye-growing effort. The U.S. has about 320,000 acres in organic corn production, and he hopes these farmers will consider adding rye to their rotations.

“It’s conceivable that we could eliminate nitrogen fertilizer applications on organic corn and we could capture the U.S. rye market,” Syburg said.

Learn more about rye production at ryerevival.org. Rye Revival is a nonprofit that Syburg helped found.

by Sonja Heyck-Merlin