One of the things we do almost every year is bale hay. Some years it's decent, other years it is just trash. I have been slowly improving the soil in our field each year. I hate the idea of having to result to chemicals to beef up our hay production. I won't fault anyone who does that. It's just not the way we do it here. Last year I drilled in a mixed cover crop on a section of field, to see how it would do. I mainly wanted to see what grew out of the mixed seed I put down. Mostly, I needed to know if the heavy iron content in my field would even let anything grow at all. My experiment showed that I still have a lot of work to do. But stuff did grow. Not really well, but still. It was something. To continue improving the field I broadcast a bit of potash, and have been making plans to sow the field in Rye this year.
Here, I took a half pound of seed and soaked it in a pan. In just over 7 hours there were kernels that had germinated. I have NEVER seen any seed sprout that fast. I watched the pan for a few days, and calculated at least an 85% germination rate. Possibly even higher than that. I'm curious to see how this will do in the field, once planted. What do you think?
I think soil testing and remediating by what you find would improve the soil a lot. By no means resort to chemicals, but simply adding the minerals missing would help. I'd suggest Logan Labs for the test and use the worksheet from The Intelligent Gardener for the mix.
I picked up a bunch of soil test kits a while back. I have a microscope and a minor chemistry lab to test my dirt. The land is calcium and iron bound. Really high in iron. The plan is a series of different cover crops and some animal rotations over the pasture/fields. It will take some time, but they will improve. The potash will help with the calcium deficit until the soils start to let go of what's there already. It might sound odd, but I would actually smile pretty big if the dandelions suddenly took off across my front field. Nature's little vitamin pumps, those.