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SW Ohio | Jake, you are over thinking this one, If you have a cover crop standing up you can plant into it easily, roots and all, IF soil conditions are favorable, i.e. the slot closes(and if it is too wet to close you can still have success as long as it stays wet until the beans get a root down and get going, it is when the open slot bakes into cast iron that you have problems). I have planted into just about every kind of vegetation that grows in the corn belt including cedar trees and cattails and have had generally good luck, a JD 750 will put that seed down "almost" anywhere. If conditions are unfavorable I have increased seed rate, sometimes it made up for bad situation, sometimes they all came up giving me 250-300,00 pop.
The problem comes more from covers that are not standing up, hairpinning being the most obvious, colder damp soils are another, won't even touch on insects or disease. In my experimenting with pumpkins, the best system I came up with was to plant a very,very thick stand of winter wheat, fertilize heavily, burn down kill the wheat just before planting or heading out(didn't always time out right), plant punkins with a 7000 notil planter, next day mow the wheat down with a haybine or bushhog. This was not organic and I did use soem chem weed control but the only weeds that gave a problem were Johnsongrass, cocleburr, and pigweed. Purpose of the straw mat was to hold the fruit off the soil, not so much as weed control although it did help. Rye is supposed to be a better cover for weeds but it can get ahead of you in a hurry, again mowing it down after planting is an option, keeps the crap out of the combine.
As for tall covers, I have been in fields that were over the hood on the 4020, only problems were seeing the marker and staying on the row, and pollen/dust/etc in my face. | |
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For the no-tillers-------what system would...........
