DeckerMMIV
Grass - Cutting and leaving
Is there or Shouldn't there be an "N' benefit of cutting and leaving grass?
Though, I'm not a big farmer I can imagine what benefits could give cutting and leaving grass over fuel wasted in such work. Grass is cut preliminary for collecting purposes either for hays or silage. Newer heard about such process in farming. Maybe could be used to prevent of soil emaciation, by cutting grass make it thicker, so effects probably abolish themselves. Another case is decoration or visual effects like short lawn or roadside ditches, but these have nothing to do with farming.
What benefits do grass clippings provide if returned to the lawn?
Grass clippings returned to the lawn provide up to 25 percent of your lawn's total fertilizer needs. Clippings contain about 4 percent nitrogen, 2 percent potassium and 1 percent phosphorus. While decomposing, they also serve indirectly as a food source for the bacteria in the soil, which are doing many beneficial things (such as decomposing thatch) for a healthy turf environment.
http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G6958
Hmm. That would be tricky to implement, to avoid continuous increases of N and PK at every growth-cycle, when there's grass (or dryGrass) "swath/windrow" on the terrain.
The "swath/windrow" layer have values from 0 to 15, which is actually the 'height' of the swath. - SoilMod then have the effect that it decreases this by 1 at every growth-cycle, to slowly "clean up / remove" any leftovers.
The problem is then, how should SoilMod determine if the "swath/windrow" that is in the field right now, is to increase N & PK or not?
what about cut grass that is spread wide rather than swathed? can soil mod recognise that and perhaps make it dissapear after one grow cycle and convert it to a small n pk boost?
It will still not solve the problem.
If cut grass was "spread wide", the "swath/windrow" layer's height would probably be 1 to 3. If cut grass was "windrowed", the "swath/windrow" layer's height would probably be 12 to 15.
SoilMod's growth-cycle will decrease the "swath/windrow" layer's height by 1. So at some point, if there was never baled, the "windrowed" part will reach a height of 1 to 3 anyway.
Besides if I add a feature, of converting cutted 'grass/dryGrass' (i.e. "swath/windrow"), only when it is at height 1, to +1 N, the growing grass would consume that +1 N anyway.
So the "benefit" of leaving cutted grass, isn't going to be that good IMO.