| NE Ridger - 8/21/2015 20:46
How many years did it actually get used? Maybe it was a great idea, everybody needed to try it out, and it didn't turn out so well.
Fads get recycled, maybe about every 130 years. ;)
Seriously, tho, I wonder about disease pressure planting untreated wheat seed into standing corn. Might not have been as much disease pressure back then as there is today, but that seems to be asking for it.
And what about nitrogen? Wasn't much synthetic fertilizer around in 1883 and the corn wouldn't have left much N out there. What did they do, spread manure on the wheat in the spring? Or in the winter?
I know the open pollinated corn didn't use N like modern hybrids but they didn't have that much to start with. It honestly doesn't sound like the greatest idea.
ETA: Maybe the idea was wheat for grazing. Get something green out there when you turn the livestock out into the corn stalks. That sounds like a much more productive idea.
I'm pretty sure it was for a grain crop. As much work as it was to install seeds with that rig, they didn't do any cover cropping! There wasn't any fertilizer needed back in those days -- there was way more nutrients than needed to grow a crop coming out of the soil OM from sod that had been broken. It took a good 40 - 50 yrs to mine most of the nutrients out of the soil from the sod, and by then mechanization was under way, so you could do more tillage, and deeper, while sitting on a tractor seat (instead of walking behind a horse) -- so they mined the soil OM at a deeper depth, and by doing more passes, and more pulverizing of the soil with heavy disks, etc. But eventually they got most of the soil OM oxidized and were more than ready for when synthetic N came along. |
Here's one of the first cover crop inter seeders (pics)
