UI Extension Study Shows Promise for Raising, Grazing Cover Crops After Grain Harvest

Sep 09, 2025

By John O’Connell

An ongoing University of Idaho Extension trial shows early promise for east-central Idaho farmers and ranchers hoping to raise two forage crops from a single field within the region’s short growing season.

The trial is in its second growing season at U of I’s Nancy M. Cummings Research, Extension and Education Center in Salmon and will continue for another one to three years. Led by Extension beef specialist John Hall, the project entails planting fall triticale, swathing and baling it as hay in June, applying herbicide to prevent regrowth and then planting a multi-species cover crop mixture.

Cover crops are generally planted primarily for soil-health benefits — such as fixing nitrogen, improving soil porosity and boosting soil organic matter — and often offer the farmer no direct commercial benefit. Hall and his colleagues, however, chose to graze their cover crops in the fall, prior to planting another triticale crop, to capture the value of the forage, while also returning nutrients and minerals to the soil through cow manure.

Source : uidaho.edu

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.