Predicting cereal cover crop biomass using shoot length in California vegetable systems

To better understand cover crop benefits and receive nitrogen scavenging credits for cropping, farmers need simple robust methods of predicting biomass production. A new regulation focused on improving management over 200,000 ha irrigated land in the central coast California motivated us to evaluate if shoot length rye (Secale cereale L., ‘Merced’) triticale (× Triticosecale Wittmack, ‘Pacheco’) could predict biomass. Field samples (n = 162) 126) were collected at various developmental growth stages from organic conventional vegetable farms planting date trials, across multiple soil types, times, row spacings, plant densities. Main was well-correlated with oven-dry (r2 0.87) 0.88). This provides beyond a simple, method estimate