Can green crops capture enough nitrogen for vegetable growing in New Zealand?
We've been doing soil tests on our Nelson market garden for the last seven years utilising the skills of a local consultant, Sjef Lamers, from Sustainable Nutrition. Sjef’s been constantly promoting the benefits of green crops, even sending us research articles to back up his claims.
Reading the articles, I realised green crops could potentially provide enough nitrogen for our crops. We also realised that New Zealand farming practices are falling behind those of overseas. There’s quite a lot of international data showing the amounts of nitrogen captured, but very few New Zealand studies. We wanted to get some quality data to quantify the nitrogen captured from various types of green crop utilised in New Zealand. We thought this could be a barrier to the wide-scale uptake of green crop use in large-scale
