From the Fields: Many benefits using drone to seed cover crops

We have a little bit of a breeze today, but I’d like to get started seeding the cover crop with the drone into soybeans. I’m going to try to get it done by the beginning of next week.

Getting the cover crop on in the hot, dry weather before a rain is ideal. If I can get the cover crop seed on the ground and then catch a rain here over the weekend or next week, we’ll have some moisture to hopefully get it germinated.

I’m mainly just doing only soybean ground. I have a mix of oats, radish and clover that’ll be on half of the acres, and the other half of the bean acres I’ll do annual ryegrass, radish and clover.

I like to get them on now, of course, ahead of the rain, but then also when the leaves start dropping, it actually shades it and keeps the moisture in to get that seed germinated. So, I kind of like seeding in the cover crops right when I start seeing the beans turn from that nice dark, lush green and gets that light color.

I plant the two different cover crop mixtures because it creates diversity, but it also helps in management. The oats, radish and clover all pretty well winterkill, and it comes down to where I don’t have to manage it as close and I’m able to just plant into it. Whereas, the annual ryegrass and radish cover crop I have to terminate and it takes more management.

I really can only spray it with Roundup to kill the annual ryegrass and I can’t have any nitrogen in with it. So, it really helps me manage cover cropping every acre also.

For the oats, radish and clover mix, I use a seeding rate of 15 pounds per acre, and for the annual rye, radish and clover mix I’m doing 12 pounds per acre, which is very, very light from the recommendations most everybody has.

But I’ve come to realize with the drone I can get the seed more evenly spread out and across the field better and be able to cut my application rate down almost in half. One, that keeps the expense down, and two, the drone does a lot better job, I think, on getting a more even stand across the whole field.

The propellers push it into the canopy. I’m only doing like a 20- to 25-foot swath. So, I’m able to narrow up my width and my swath in order to get a more even better stand because the seed is so light and fluffy. It seems like the blades on the drone really push it into the canopy and onto the ground a lot better.