Farming Forward: Modifying planters to manage cover crop residue

Hi, I'm Berner Tobin. Welcome to Farming Forward. On this episode, we're going to travel to Mitchell, Ontario, where on a rainy April morning, I caught up with Adam Rose to discuss how Rose Farms utilises cover crops in their operation and how they manage cover crop residue. The key to their approach is a series of planter modifications from row cleaners to downforce and row unit adjustments. I return to the farm in May to catch up with Adam and take a look at the planter in action. Here's my conversation with Adam as we Explore Rose Farm's 10 year journey to fine tune their cover crop strategy and residue management. So, Adam, we're here at the farm just outside Mitchell. Give us a snapshot, tell us about the operation. So I farm with my brother Jordan and dad Perry and our wives help too. And so we grow corn and edible beans and wheat and we're dabbling a little bit in winter barley as well. Trying to expand our crops, I guess. Let's talk about, let's talk about COVID crops. Tell us how long you've been growing cover crops and how, how has it evolved over the years? So we started out just growing oats and peas after wheat and at that time we were full tillage, so we're, we were planting those after wheat and then ploughing it in. And we've evolved away from heavy tillage because we found there was, we feel there's more benefit to the soil by not doing that fall tillage pass and now we've evolved further. We're trying to let that cover crop grow as long as we can into the spring just ahead of planting or even just after planting, if we can. So let's talk about, I guess, the challenges you run into when you're growing a cover crop and then planting a corn crop into it. What about residue slugs? You got a lot of things to think about. Yeah, sure. Every year is different. We seem to learn something new every year for sure. So I guess timing of desiccation that relies on how, how heavy the COVID crop mix was over the winter because sometimes you get winter kill, sometimes you get more than what thought was going to overwinter. Some years are cooler than others. So these all play a factor in how late we let the COVID crop go. So you kind of got to roll with the punches a little bit and. You have a Stripper. Right. A really neat machine here, and we'll take a look at it again. You desiccate, but sometimes you turn into the stripper. So some years when it gets cool and there's not a lot of sun, we feel that having a blacker strip and maybe a wider blacker strip is going to be a benefit. So rather than going full strip till where you work six inches deep or whatever, we're just shearing the very top layer off. Because when we use. We use a stripper header and wheat. So a lot of those plants are still attached to the soil. Well, that's why we use it. But it's hard to move that out of the way just with residue managers. And we're real cleaners, so we're shearing that off and moving it out of the way, making a blocker strip. And it was something that we built ourselves because there wasn't something on the market that we 100% wanted. Now, Adam, this here corn planter plays a big role in your success and how you tackle that cover crop. Talk about, I guess. I guess the journey in developing and putting this machine together. So the first thing we found was that we needed to keep the row units from bouncing and keep them in the ground steady all the time. So we addressed that. And row cleaners, we went from pin adjust to full floating, so they move with the soil independently of the row cleaners. And then closing the seed slot was the next big thing. So we've addressed that as well. And it's. It's been a process over the last close to 10 years, I guess. So let's. Let's take a walk around this planter, and I want you to talk about a few things and some of the modifications you've done for success. One of the first things we added was a dual fertiliser system. I said dual because we're putting starter through the keaton seed firmers, and then we were dribbling it out the back, nitrogen out the back, and we've since moved on, and we're now going through concealed knives on both sides of the row. So what this does is it gives us early season vigour through the starter, and then when we're banding the nitrogen and we put a bit of foss with it too, that extends a period of time to where we can side dress and side dressing changes from year to year, what we do there, but it just buys us some time. We're running Dawn GFX roll cleaners. The thing I like about them is they move independently of the, of the roll unit because they're frame mounted, so it doesn't transfer any energy to the roll unit. And instead of pushing, they pull. So they just, they follow the ground really nicely, we find, and they make a nice clean sweep with the cupped wheels. Early on, we found that delta force was going to play a key role. It keeps the row unit in constant contact with the ground, with the soil, and not only that, it keeps a consistent pressure so we're not overloading the soil, but yet we still have enough pressure to keep the slot from folding in. Once we added delta force, we found out that it wanted to lift the frame in the centre because there's a centre hinge on these planters. We devised a system with a hydraulic cylinder in the middle to actually pull the centre of the frame back down to keep it level, but yet it can still move. It's plumbed into the delta force. So when you turn on the delta force with the hydraulic remote, it pressurises the cylinder and holds the planter down. So one of the things we worked on was the frame. We had a 1760 front fold wing fold before, and we went to a 1770 front fold because we wanted to add extra tanks compared to what our old planter was. So after we added the tanks, we had to add all the plumbing and that. We also, we added radial tyres to carry the extra weight around. And then once we did all that, we had to add the brackets to hold our hydraulic cylinder for the centre pivot to keep everything level. So the final thing to talk about that's fairly important is closing the seed trench. We found that if you don't get it closed, you have a lot of slug issues. They crawl down, they'll find a hole and they crawl in there and they just, they'll destroy the corn seeds in the bottom of the trench. So we found, we looked at a bunch of different systems. We tried closing wheels, single stage closing wheel. Found that a two stage closing system was going to be the ticket for us. There's other systems out there that are two stage, but we went with the furrow force for the extra adjustability on the fly. There's adjustability in these discs, how far apart they are from, from the seed slot for this year. I've got them set right close together for the most aggressive closing. Last year I still, in our wet conditions, still had trouble in spots. So I'm hoping this year moving the disc together is going to give me that last little bit that I need in closing the furrow everywhere. I'll take you through the system here. There's an airbag here that. That's what adds the pressure to the whole system. And the airbag's controlled automatically through a way pin here. This is the depth control. So this adjusts how deep the discs run in relation to the pressure wheels at the back here. So you want these wheels to run at or just above the seating depth. So we have to adjust them between corn and beans because we plant the beans shallower. So then we. Yeah, this is. The pressure is adjustable from the cab, but really you still need to get out and cheque and make sure everything's closed up tight enough the way you want it. And then you can set it in the cab to make sure that there's consistent pressure all the time. So there you have it. A good look at this planter. Adam, you mentioned before we started that, you know, you're really happy with where you are with this planter. Anything to add in the future years, or as I say, is it just keep rolling? Well, we're enjoying not having a year where we have to change things the end. Because every year in the last eight years I've been doing something to it. So as far as the planter goes, we've been happy with it and we'll continue to run it this way. And having that stripper helps you sort of manage, I guess, that situation in front of the planter. Right. It adds options for sure. It's good to have options when it comes to comes to this sort of thing. 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