Constant Canopy Gaining National Attention
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA farmer in Gaston is gaining national attention for using cash and cover crops in unison. Jason Mauck, chief executive officer of Constant Canopy says the idea is nothing new. “It started in the Depression. Farmers would sow wheat into corn,” said Mauck, whose background was in landscaping before coming back home to the farm. “It just didn’t make much sense that we were only growing one crop. I’m used to flowers and different plant species, so I started experimenting with wheat and soybeans, and found there was a herbicide synergy there in place.”
And Mauck’s four years of trial and error paid off. Constant Canopy now owns the state record for soybean yield per acre. That success has led to a social media following that Constant Canopy Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Lamb says allows the company to share ideas. “That’s the whole idea behind Constant Canopy,” said Lamb. “It’s a system to make farms more profitable and people really like it and are able to see video and can follow Jason on Twitter and a lot of things on YouTube, really just explaining the process to people so they can understand it.”
Mauck explains that Constant Canopy works by letting the wheat replace a lot of the costs. He says the wheat “will draw moisture consumption” mirroring the supply and demand graph of water. “The beans will grow in the wheat roots, and the wheat is in time and space, controlling the wheat pressure in that space. So once we remove the wheat, we get contribution margin, and then allow sunlight to actually infiltrate into the soybean canopy but we have the corpse of the wheat laying down on the ground floor,” said Mauck. “We cool the surface, the beans get more light. And that’s when the magic happens.”
And with an abnormally wet spring in Indiana, getting out into the fields has been a challenge for farmers all across the state. But according to Lamb, Constant Canopy is currently growing some of the best beans in the state. “When people came to our field day and really saw how large our beans were, and the nodes count that Jason’s getting on them it’s pretty amazing.”