cover crops

we do cover crops here. wheat and radishes clover mostly. i bought a gandy air seeder last year to use and i havnt got to yet but  im really wanting to. so iv been on youtube and seen where farmers are interseeding cover crops into the corn while the corn is still young. i think this gives the cover crop a better start then waiting till september or so to plant them...

  I do mostly rye in soybean/corn rotation.   alot more variety into wheat stubble that is then pastured.

My grandfather used to walk thru the standing corn in Sept and broadcast turnips so the hogs and cows would have them to eat along with what was left of the corn after we shucked it.I've left spaces in corn (very small scale) so I can ride my Massey Ferguson 1650 garden tractor between the rows to broadcast Crimson Clover and turnips for a cover crop with a Herd seeder.

I have Crimson clover just starting to emerge. It is actually a legume so I am hoping to to get a little nitrogen boost in the soil, keep the weeds down and build up some organic matter. Perique tobacco will be planted in the spring.

  I agree on studying up on 'no till' facts.   maybe take a soil test probe and see how easy it goes into the no-till ground compared to the plow panned tilled ground!

  I've been on this dryland farm since 1961.  It has crete loam soil which reminds people of how limestone is formed.   I'd love some good red clay soil!

I have the Piedmont Red Clay and can tell you its great for pasture land but it can get
as hard as the bricks General Shale makes from it if run over or worked when its the least bit
wet which is hard to avoid when doing things like feeding cattle in the Winter.Subsoiling pastures works good and breaks up the clay plus the hard pan underneath as there is very little topsoil in the first place.Not alot of crop farming close to me but a dairy farm about 10 miles from me no tills corn but will chisel plow every couple years anyway to loosen up the ground and they plant tillage radishes and probably 50% survive most Winters depending on the temperatures which can vary widely here.I plant turnips and Crimson Clover on the small plots I work and the turnips will survive most Winters and the Crimson Clover always survives.I chisel plow every year before planting anything to increase workability and to increase water retention.I've worked on building up the organic matter in the plots I plant in every year but I can't see how I'd ever be able to build up organic matter in land not tilled up as the clay would just keep getting tighter and tighter if no tilled and never chisel plowed or subsoiled,the radishes wouldn't make a dent.

X2 what Chris says....I tried no til here on my farm for several years (can't test it with just 1-2 years) but I also did conventional tillage, this was done in the same field, side by side. and the no til side kept losing yields compared to the conventional side. same fertilizers and chemicals and seed. I finally deep ripped the entire farm and grew the best crops that had ever been here! then stayed with conventional tillage. it just worked better for me. the new renters farming it now, no tilled, and put everything in corn, they planted it irrigated population, but this is dryland. there wasn't any ears longer than about 5 inches. most less than that. some ears were cob only, no kernels. we have been out picking up the small ears on the ground, as when ever they came to a corner, they just turned and kept going. when they harvested they couldn't combine the sharp curves and just run the stalks down and kept going! lots of nubbin ears laying out there. we'll feed them to the goats! we've picked up a pickup load already just on the corners of the fields! lol

No till doesn't work everywhere...I farm alot of gravel river bottoms that got harder than hammered hell after 5 years of no tilling...weeds got resistant, yields kept dropping. We went back to chiseling and even moldboarding and the weed pressure went down and the yields went back up...some guys have toyed with cover crops around here and found that the rye grass was really rooting down good...so good it plugged up their field tiles...we had a warm winter and a very wet spring this year so killing the cover crops off with chemicals was a real nightmare for some guys this year..I'll keep doing what works for us