Cover Crop Rigs To Make Planting Easier

This would be a good spot to share with you some other ways we worked around the challenge of timely planting and labor shortages when planting cover crops. One way of handling the planting bottleneck is to have the cover crops custom planted. In fact, the planting rig described in previous posts with the Valmar seeder and the Phillips Harrow is used by Scout Seed Company to custom plant for customers. This venture into custom planting was well-received and it stays busy.

The neighbor we spoke of earlier that farms 6-7000 acres uses this set up to plant all of his cover crops. Every acre this guy farms has a cover on it. He even uses a warm season covercrop after corn prior to planting a wheat crop. Mind you this is in the same year. Corn is cut late August into September. Wheat is planted mid-November into early December and this farmer utilizes this short window to add one more set of growing roots to feed the soil until the cash crop is planted.

This farmer always has seed in the hopper on the implement and does not miss a minute of planting time. When they are harvesting corn or soybeans, while the dew is still on the plants and there is a waiting time for the dew to evaporate, the implement is running. The farmer has a bale picker to harvest the cotton crop. He has an employee that helps fuel and service the picker in the morning and when the service operation is complete the employee’s responsibility is planting the cover crop. They do not worry about cutting the cotton stalks ahead of the Phillips Harrow. They just plant right through the standing stalks and not cutting the stalks saves another trip. You would think that by not cutting the cotton stalks that there may be an issue the following year, but there is no problem. By spring planting the stalks are brittle and just fall apart.

Another huge time saver on our farm is that we spread the multi-species mix on peanuts prior to digging. At that time, we have a lull in the action and this is a perfect time to get some cover crop in the ground. Always look for a lull. We spread the seed on the standing peanuts a few days before the peanuts are dug and the process of digging doubles as the planting.

This was very efficient use of available time and equipment. The digging was a two-fer. I love two-fers. If I were still farming and had peanuts, to make this even more efficient I would mount a Gandy dry insecticide rig somehow, allowing us to spread as we dug the peanuts and saving a trip with the spreader. I have a gut feeling that if we spread a legume cover crop on this peanut land and followed with cotton the next season, we could make a cotton crop with little or no commercial nitrogen.

We are doing on-farm research to figure that last one out. Stay tuned.