Boy it has been a long time since I learned this. I hope I recall it
correctly. Clover, and I think the other similar legumes, have a symbiotic
bacteria, in clover it is found in little nodules on the roots, that fix
nitrogen. So if you can keep the roots from competing too much with your
other crop, you can grow the two crops together and the nitrogen is
available as long as the bacteria lives.

"Archimedes Plutonium" wrote in message
...


Dean Hoffman wrote:


One small point. Soybeans are legumes. Applied nitrogen for corn
following a soybean crop can be reduced by 45#/acre. There's probably
more
info here than you really want to know.

http://www.ianr.unl.edu/pubs/fieldcrops/g174.htm

Dean

Very helpful, thanks Dean. I was not able to get that reference, perhaps
too busy.

Anyway, I have a ton of questions that need answers as to mowing of
legumes in the strips for fertilizer and the rows of cash crop. If I
planted
corn in rows and leave a 3 or 4 or 5 foot strip to mow between rows, the
important question is whether alfalfa, or clover, or soybeans provide the
corn with nitrogen fertilizer if I take the clippings and sell them as a
2nd
cash crop.

I do know from experience that when you plow under a field of alfalfa
and then plant corn in that field that it becomes the best corn crop you
ever seen.

So what I really need to know is the science research of whether a legume
provided fertilizer only in the plowing over. Or whether that legume
also provides fertilizer to the nearby crop row if the clippings were to
remain. Or, *best of all*, whether the root system of legumes provide
the nearby crop row with nitrogen fertilizer and that the clippings of the
legume can also be harvested and sold as a 2nd cash crop.

Seems to me that the world has millions of farmers that some of them
must have had some experience whether accidentially or by design with
knowing what will happen if you have a crop row and have a legume
growing between the crop rows.

My guess is that if you have a crop row of say corn or tomatoes and have
a legume such as soybeans or alfalfa or clover growing between that you
can mow the legume and sell it as a cash crop and that the legume does
fertilize the crop rows but that the yield from the legume and the yield
from
the cash crop are nowhere near the yield of a monoculture herbicide and
fertilizer
method. But when you combine that yield of the cash crop with the legume
crop
that equals the monoculture result. And the great benefit is that Mowing
Method
does not need any fertilizer nor need any herbicide application. And, if
there
were
any easy means of harvesting, the MowingMethod need not ever use a tractor
at all.

Summary: I need the science data research of whether a legume crop nearby
to rows of corn or rows of tomatoes provides fertilizer solely from its
root
system and whether the mowing clippings can be sold as a 2nd cash crop.

It would be wonderful to think that if farmers planted tomatoes or corn in
rows and between the tomatoes and corn was alfalfa that fertilize the
tomatoes
and corn and that come harvest time the farmer has 2 or 3 cash crops of
the
tomatoes and
corn and the alfalfa between the rows. Wonderful in that you eliminate the
need
to ever plow the field and that you eliminate fertilizer and herbicide.

Archimedes Plutonium,
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies