Charles White
Penn State University

Cover crops can offer a multitude of benefits and ecosystem services to farmers and society.  But to effectively realize these potential benefits, cover crops need to be managed with the same care and precision as cash crops.  This includes developing an understanding of how management choices such as species selection, planting date, and termination timing interact with site-specific soil and climatic factors to affect the desired services.  In this seminar, nearly a decade of cover crop research conducted by a multidisciplinary team of scientists at Penn State will be synthesized to show how managing cover crop functional diversity is important to increasing the multifunctionality of cover crops; how the composition of cover crop mixtures responds dramatically to climate and soil nitrogen status, potentially destabilizing the services provided by cover crops; and how we can use biogeochemical theory, agronomic soil and plant testing, and commercially available sensors to predict the effect of cover crops on nitrogen supply to a following crop with sub-field resolution.  These findings point the way forward for implementing data-driven, site-specific management of cover crops.