As farmers prepare to plant this season, the perfect seedbed isn’t always possible.
“I realize if you had prevent plant in 2019, when 2020 came around, you weren’t stopping for anything,” says Farm Journal Field Agronomist Ken Ferrie. “The reality is so many of the disasters or train wrecks we look at are from when farmers pushed conditions too hard.”
Regardless of conditions, too dry or too wet, take time to recheck settings.
“All this technology doesn’t mean much if somebody doesn’t get off the machine and go behind the planter and do what we call a cross-section of the furrow,” Ferrie says. “You should make a cross-cut of the furrow, find the seed and not be able to tell how it got there.”
As cover crops make their way on to more acres, dealing with that new planting environment brings its own challenges.
“Obviously you want to find out if the cover crop will be killed or if it is going to be live,” asks David Moeller of Washington County, Iowa. “How tall is it going to be — 3” or 4”, 10” to 12” or 3’ to 5’?”
He says the key to a good stand is getting the seed down into the soil without sacrificing the benefit of the cover crop.
“I say if we can take and split that mass, whether it’s dead or alive doesn’t matter,” Moeller says. “Then we can put the seed in the ground.”
Setting up the planter to accomplish those goals continues to evolve.
“It used to be we’d use a no-till coulter,” Moeller says. “Well, nowadays, we always say that’s the first thing we take off the planter around here because the row cleaners will do the job by themselves.”
Opinions are also changing on whether to let those covers stand or terminate them ahead of the planter pass.
“I think it tends to be easier to plant into green grass than something that has been terminated already because the stems are a little tougher than green growing material,” says Brian Hora, a Washington County, Iowa Farmer. “It’s easy to slice.”
The fertility system the farm uses might determine how to handle the expected carbon penalty.
“We’re going to be terminating that cover crop when it’s a lot shorter,” says Michael Vittetoe, a Washington County, Iowa, farmer. “It’s going to break down faster and the nutrients are going to cycle back through faster while not pulling as much water out of the subsoil.”
Vittetoe says for their Iowa operations, soybeans are different.
“We’ll probably plant our beans fairly early again, usually the end of April or first part of May, and then terminate our rye cover crop at a later time based on how the moisture levels are looking,” Vittetoe explains. “It’s an active management decision and each growing season you have to make decisions.”
Those decisions are based on the environment and the current situation as farmers work to win the furrow this season.
