Longtime western Oklahoma no-tiller Jimmy Smith and his son Spencer keep their sandy soils in place by interseeding cereal rye into standing cotton. They’re using a Dalton Ag Mobility 600 fertilizer applicator to get the job done. Check it out.

“We used to always interseed cotton with modified grain drills to go in between rows. The cotton varieties progressed so much that we were doing a lot of damage to our crop. 2 years ago, we went to broadcasting cereal rye in our crop. This machine here — it’s a fertilizer applicator and it’s tall enough that it won’t do any damage to cotton. We’ve got it set to 40-inch rows. It takes 12 rows, which is the same as our planter. We run probably 6-7 mph with it. We can cover a lot of ground, plus it pumps a lot of seed, where our grain drills didn’t hold maybe 30 bushels, so we were filling all the time. This one here, we can cover a lot of acres. It’s efficient, easy and doesn’t do any crop damage, which is the main thing.”   

 Their seeding rate is about 70 pounds per acre. Smith says the rye also helps with weed suppression. “When we’ve got bare ground, we’ve got weeds,” as he puts it.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.