If a farmer needs a good reason to try cover crops, Dwight Clary has a list a page long. But all the environmental advantages, yield benefits and improvements in soil health won’t  convince farmers if they can’t figure out the logistics of fitting cover crops into a production system.

Even cost share programs that help farmers pay for seed don’t always win permanent converts, he notes. “It’s a sad thing to see farmers doing cover crops for payment, and then when the payment runs out, they’re not using cover crops.”

Clary, who farms with his wife, Lisa, near Fostoria, is enthusiastic about cover crops because of the improvements he’s seen in his own soils. To help demonstrate the differences, he’s conducting a three-year study with a neighboring farm to compare his conservation production system with a conventional production system. Besides comparing the crop yields and soil qualities, they’ll be comparing equipment and chemical inputs.

 “Our hope is to get a comparison baseline,” he explains. “We’re taking a systems approach rather than looking at one factor at a time.”

Clary has also been promoting the use of cover crops by addressing the timing problem that prevents many farmers from trying cover crops. Planting cover crops after corn or soybean crops are harvested leaves the cover crops with a short growing season, and farmers are often too busy in the fall to manage seeding as well as harvest. In 2010, Clary began selling cover crop seed and working with Gibbs Aero Spray based in Fremont to coordinate aerial seeding of cereal rye into standing corn and soybeans on his own farm and other area farms. Since then, he estimates, they’ve flown cereal rye on to about 40,000 acres in eight northwestern Ohio counties.  

More recently, Clary has also been teaming up with Paul Falter, a farmer from Bellevue, who built his own rig for interseeding cover crops into standing corn, wheat or soybeans. Falter covered over 6,000 acres with the interseeder in 2017, starting in July. He traveled as far north as Toledo and as far south as Marion with the machine, which can be hauled on a lowboy trailer.

Time-tested success
Cover crops are a time-tested way of improving soils, Clary says. “I tell farmers all the time that their fathers and grandfathers used cover crops. They just called them plow-downs.” Using cover crops along with no-till offers even more benefits, he adds. “They take no-till to the next level.”

After 36 years of no-till and cover crops, Clary is seeing dramatic changes in his fields. For instance, last spring, heavy rains caused creeks to overflow, and many of his fields were flooded like others in the area.  But once the creeks returned to their banks, the water in his fields soaked in quickly while standing water remained for days on some neighboring fields. The difference isn’t due to better subsurface drainage, Clary explains. The years of continuous no-till and cover crops have improved his soil’s infiltration rates and water-holding capacity. Later in the season, the improved water-holding capacity became obvious because his crops showed less drought stress when the weather turned dry.

Clary balances the cost of cover crop seed, planting and management with reduced expenses for tillage and tillage equipment. Cover crops have also helped him reduce fertilizer and herbicide costs and eliminate the need for insecticides and fungicides.

“The health of the system allows that plant to survive better,” he says. “When you look at all the chemical inputs I quit buying, the net income goes up.”

Instead of focusing on cost, Clary prefers to consider the return on investment of cover crops. For example, a good stand of radishes seeded with wheat captures and holds enough nutrients that he can reduce his fertilizer budget by about $10 an acre. “It’s like a little time-release capsule of nutrients that you bought and paid for.”

Clary has seen some farmers struggle to capture the value of cover crops because their seeding rates are too low. In some cases, they were using the minimum seeding rate to qualify for a cost-share payment. “There’s nothing wrong with government cover crop payments,” he stresses. “But you need to use a rate that will give you an agronomic and economic return on your investment.”

For the Clarys, experimentation is part of farming, and they’ve tried a variety of cover crop species, seeding rates, planting dates and planting methods over the years. “We’ve had some disasters,” Clary admits. However, those experiments are necessary to determine which practices are most effective. This past July, the Clarys worked with Falter and Gibbs to seed a blend of 15 species of cover crops along with controlled-release, polymer-coated urea into standing corn growing in 15-inch rows. “We want to see what those species will do with the shade,” explains Clary.

Building a better seeder
Falter started out farming using tillage, but he realized no-till and cover crops could help him improve the tight yellow clays he was dealing with in Seneca County. “I realized there was a better way,” he says. In 2011, Falter built his first cover crop interseeder so he could plant into standing crops on his own farm. Then in 2013, he built his current machine and began doing some custom seeding for other farmers.

To build the interseeder, Falter converted a self-propelled, high-clearance sprayer by adding a pressurized seed tank. The 180-bushel tank is divided into two compartments. The divided tank gives him flexibility to apply fertilizer along with seed or to plant two species of cover crops at the same time.

The system blows seed or fertilizer from the tank through primary tubes to distribution towers. From there, the product travels through secondary tubes into seed drop tubes. For seeding into corn, Falter uses long tubes with deflector ends to distribute the seed beneath the canopy. For seeding over soybeans, he uses shorter drop tubes with deflectors to disperse the seed as it leaves the tubes.

The machine has a boom width of 120 feet and includes automatic section controls for planting accuracy. To minimize tire damage to crops, Falter built plant shields out of rubber mud flaps that push plants aside as the machine travels through the field.

Building the machine required a considerable investment in both time and money, Falter notes, but he wasn’t willing to wait until a commercially produced interseeding rig was available. He wanted one to use on his own farm and doing custom seeding is helping offset the expense, he says. “There’s a need for it.” Widespread use of cover crops allows capital that would have been spent on a tillage lineup to be focused elsewhere within the operation, he says. “You’re trying to change generations of tillage practices and that is no easy task.”