Alex Frasier remembers taking naps as a little kid in the tractor while his dad Jayme was driving around, working the field. Fast forward to 2024 and the Faulkton, S.D., no-tiller is working with his dad on the farm, interseeding cover crops into no-till soybeans with Jayme’s blessing

“It took about 6 months of convincing — basically from the harvest of 2019 to when we ordered the seed in early April of 2020 — to actually do it,” Frasier says. “He was very skeptical. I think he understood on some level, but it was just such a foreign idea and no one else was doing it. That led to some trepidation, but I've been very lucky to have a dad who's willing to listen to a completely foreign idea and take a chance.”

The Frasiers took a big chance by planting 450 acres of soybeans and planting cover crops on all but 10 of those acres the very first year they implemented this interseeding system.

“I don't know if it was smart or not, but we basically jumped into a pool with no water just to see if it would work, and it did,” Frasier says. 

Attention to Detail

Since then, the Frasiers have planted cover crops on every acre for a total of 2,000 acres interseeded over the past 4 years. Initially, Frasier thought cover crops would help them save on the cost of chemicals. But over the last few years, he has seen far more benefits. He uses…