This series of updates will focus on what I've done this summer after wheat harvest up until just prior to soybean harvest. This is about manure management and what cover crops can do to scavenge the nutrients from summer applied manure and hold them for next years crop. Also on some aerial seeding of annual rye grass into standing corn crop.

Starting in late July after our wheat harvest I have to empty some of my hog pits due to not having enough storage in them to last until after fall harvest. I also have some dry straw bedding from hogs and cattle.

The liquid swine manure is injected into the soil with a 4 point injector on the tank wagon. This is an old style unit and does a lot of tillage. I need to do a leveling pass after words with the field cultivator to get it seed able again. Wish I had one of the newer low disturbance injectors.

These are the two manure fields for this year. I bale the straw and sometimes clip the stubbles and bale them. That's why the one on the left looks bare. In the field on the left is the line where the injected manure stopped on the left and regular stubble's start on the right. In the right photo I only baled the windrowed straw.

The parts of these fields that did not have manure injected and tillage done were sprayed with roundup to kill some of the volunteer wheat and weeds that were present. COVER CROPS NEED TO BE MANAGED AS WELL AS ANY OTHER CROP IF YOU WANT GOOD RESULTS. This means a weed free start at seeding.

This year instead of using ammonium sulfate (21-0-0-24) fertilizer as a carrier and spinning on the annual rye grass, I opted to no-till it in with a 750 JD drill. Fertilizer is still a little expensive.

I used a mixture of annual rye grass at 20 lbs. per acre and about 3 lbs. per acre of oil seed radishes. I dumped them into the regular grain box and mixed them up by hand. Seeding depth was about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch deep. The seeding chart I used said to use a #10 setting. This ended up being a little heavy because we ran out and had to get two more bags of rye grass. The seeding date was about the 10th of August. There was adequate soil moisture plus a week later we recieved some nice showers.


Here is the result about three weeks later. The oil seed radishes are the wide leafed plants. You can see the pattern from the manure injectors. About every 30 inches there is a dark strip. These pictures don't do it justice but it was incredable how the cover crops use the nutrients from the manure. Next year as the residue decomposes its better than any commercial fertilizer.

Just after Labor day about the 9th I had some annual rye grass flown on two standing corn fields. I would have liked to have done this two weeks earlier as we had some nice showers than. with this process you are at the mercy of an aireal applicator and fungicide applications take preferance than. There are two differant groups that I have used that put this service together. They do one rate (25 lbs. per acre) and move through an area. So you have to wait sometimes. The cost this year was $11.00 per acre for flying and $.67 cents for the seed cost.

The pilot flew a 50 foot pattern and was about 50 feet above the crop. This year they also put some end passes on which should help better the coverage there. I was surprised that some of this was sprouted and growing about 10 days after it was flown on. The weather has been dry, but there has been a lot of due and some fog in the mornings. After harvest we will see if this works better for me this year.