The weather conditions this spring forced farmers who plant cover crops to plant green this year. Ron Zelle of Waverly, Iowa, has been planting cover crops for 10 years on all of his 300 acres of soybeans and corn. He said he uses two different cover crops on his soybean ground, but the rapeseed that he planted last September struggled to get started.
Zelle said he turns sheep out on a third of the cover crops. The sheep were able to graze through last December on the cereal rye and rapeseed cover crop. When it came to planting this spring, he planted “green” and ended up not planting soybeans until the third week of May, when the cereal rye was waist- to head-high.
“I started to plant cover crops to get more organic matter; however, the weed control with the soybeans and cereal rye is great,” Zelle said. He said that for planting this year, he increased the down pressure. He runs a John Deere 7000 planter with regular rubber press well and a shark tooth row cleaner that removes debris right in front of each row.
Zelle said the corn went in well but there was some concern where the ground had packed down. “The emergence was pretty good,” he said. Zelle said that he used a 15-foot cult packer to crimp the cover crop down and to firm the seed bed.
There is a tremendous amount of organic matter to decompose now, he said. One benefit to planting into a cover crop, according to Iowa State University trials, is greater weed suppression. In studies conducted in 2019 and .
