As part of the Living Lab–Ontario project funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Brett Israel tested strategies to make reduced tillage more scalable for organic field crop production systems in southern Ontario by double cropping soybeans with small grains and forages and adding N-fixing forages to his corn rotation.

In a Nutshell

Over two years of trials, the most promising systems that emerged from his investigations included:

• Overwintered cereal rye harvested for forage before planting soybeans
• Winter barley planted ahead of short season soybeans
• Spring-planted alfalfa harvested for forage and then incorporated as the sole nitrogen source for the following corn crop