Plant Sciences Commons^™

Developing Alternative Forage Production Strategies For Enhanced Environmental And Economic Resilience On New England Dairy Farms, Samantha Glaze-Corcoran

Doctoral Dissertations

Cover crops are prized for their array of well documented and widely respected ecosystem services. Cover crops are an intrinsic part of building and sustaining soil health and thus the long term productive capacity of agricultural soils. However, effective cover crop adoption on New England dairy farms is lacking, and the benefits of traditional cover crops may be somewhat mismatched to the needs of dairy farms. Harvesting winter hardy small cereal grains for forage can provide practical incentive to farmers to incorporate effective cover crop management as well as provide an economic benefit in the form of additional on-farm forage …