Cover Crop Disaster

The first 11 minutes of this video will save you weeks worth of worry and many days in the shop! For 3 years now, we have been fumbling our way through learning to plant into high bio-mass cover crops. Just when we felt like we had it figured out, the weather threw us an insane curveball and we had to start from scratch.

Normally, we plant into standing, green cover crop in early to mid May. This year we were rained out of the field from April 25th to June 13th. During that time, the cover crop completely matured (think billions of viable seeds on extremely dry, tough stems) and was blown down by an intense storm on May 26th. We had never planted through anything like this.

After putting on what felt like endless combinations of row cleaners, coulters, disc openers, and closing wheels, we took the planter to the field and went through the brutal process of finding every way NOT to plant cover crop. Finally, we identified the combination of equipment that would give us our best chance at getting a good crop planted… if it ever quits raining.

On our John Deere 1770 NT with Precision Planting vDrives and DeltaForce, we try every combination of:

  • row cleaners

  • no-till coulters

  • Prescription Tillage Technology STP Disc Openers

  • Copperhead closing wheels

  • Schaffert Manufacturing Zipper closing wheels

We want to say a big THANK YOU to Griggs Farms LLC for helping us find a solution that really worked!

You may enjoy this video if you want to:

  • Plant into cover crop

  • Apply the principles of soil health on your farms

  • Reduce erosion and loss of nutrients

  • Increase beneficial soil biology

  • Increase earthworm populations

  • Increase soil organic matter

  • Capture "free" nitrogen from the atmosphere for your crops

  • Learn more about regenerative agriculture

Micayla GiffinComment