When Loran Steinlage hears someone say, “I want to be where you are” when it comes to interseeding, he says it’s a sure sign that person is setting themselves up for failure. It takes patience and practice to set the groundwork.
Steinlage has been tinkering with interseeding, relay cropping and other advanced farming systems on his West Union, Iowa, farm since 2006, though he would call the practices traditional, not advanced. In fact he insists on spelling interseeding ‘innerseeding,’ the spelling used in the literature from the 1800s that he used when researching the practices.
The then strip-tiller started by interseeding cover crops — which he joked with 2021 National No-Till Conference attendees were his ‘gateway drug’ to using every inch of his soil at all times.
Steinlage was recognized as a No-Till Innovator at the conference, thanks to his ever-advancing cropping system. Keeping a living root in the soil every minute of the year by interseeding cover crops and companion crops and relay cropping, his soil health has far surpassed other farmed soils in the area, he says.
Constant roots and various root types have helped build soil structure that helps pull moisture into his soil profile. The biological activity makes it a struggle to keep residue on the soil surface — a challenge he’s glad to tackle. And adding cover crops and a buckwheat companion crop have beneficial insects swarming to his fields to the benefit of his cash crops.
Defining the Difference
Interseeding: According to University of Wisconsin Integrated Pest and Crop Management, interseeding is the practice of planting a cover crop or companion crop into a field where another crop is in the vegetative growth stage.
Companion Cropping: The practice of growing two or more cash crops together. The crops may be seeded at the same time or relay cropped. The crops generally have some sort of benefit such as a yield increase or reduction in disease or pest pressure.
Relay Cropping: A form of double cropping where the second crop is interseeded into a growing crop. The relay crop will be actively growing when the first crop is harvested and will continue growing to maturity. This is a useful tool where short growing season makes seeding a second crop after harvest impossible. It also keeps a living root in the soil at all times.
While he now companion crops, he started by interseeding cover crops.
“By 2012 we had [interseeding cover crops] dialed in. By 2014, we were doing it on every acre of our farm. But we never shot for the moon right off the bat. It was a slow, steady progression as we figured out the key principles,” he says.
The process has proven well worth it.
“Through all the years we’ve innerseeded cover crops, we’ve averaged a cost of about $15 per acre and can prove pretty easily that we’re getting a 15-bushel gain in our corn crop,” he says. Even more impressive numbers — a 25% higher return on investment than a 234-bushel monoculture corn crop — have him now pushing to get companion crops on every acre.
While the process will be unique to almost every farm, Steinlage feels his farm’s characteristics give him the ability to assist a wide variety of farmers. Steinlage works with more than 25 different soil types ranging from gravel to pure peat — the result of farming both on a glacial till line and straddling a Loess hill.
“The diversity I have here helps me translate what I’m doing to other people’s farms. If it works here, there’s a pretty good chance we can make it work elsewhere,” he says.
Still, Steinlag advises growers to slow down and start with the basics (See Sidebar below).
7 Basic Tips to Tackle Intercropping
While everyone will have to work through their own progression, Loran Steinlage has a few tips to help nudge things along.
1. Start on the poorest ground. “If you’re going to start tackling some of the stuff we’re doing, that’s your playground. It’s where you have the most to gain, so get started there,” he says. To look at it another way, it’s where you have the least to lose.
2. Play the “What If” game. “I’m usually running 25 different scenarios in my head at all times,” Steinlage says. “You’ve got to be looking ahead.” If there’s a drought, can the field be grazed? If a volunteer crop comes up, can it be cleaned from the cash crop? There should be a constant flow of scenarios and solutions. Having an answer in place before the question is posed or the challenge encountered helps ease minds and prevent knee-jerk reactions.
3. Evaluate the “Why” of the interseeded or companion crops. “You’ve got to define why you’re growing these crops together before you just do it and say, ‘Hey, that was easy. We got that part done,’” he says. Corn and soybeans may be able to be grown together, but why? Is there a demand for that mixture? Why put two main cash crops and two warm season crops together?
4. Don’t get attached to a piece of equipment. “If you see a way to build it better, do it,” Steinlage says. He once took a drill, tore it down and rebuilt it then tore it apart and rebuilt it again 6 weeks later. He then immediately sold it and built his own drill from scratch using what he had learned.
5. Precision and good seed-to-soil contact are critical when interseeding cover crops. “We can throw seed out there with the best of them, but if you’re going to get interseeding and companion cropping to where it cash flows, you have to minimize your expenses,” he says. “Getting good seed-to-soil contact allows us to use lower seeding rates and commit fewer dollars per acre, making it easy to cash flow this system.”
6. Time interseeding by the forecast, not by corn stage. “Understand your climate. If we’re in a hot, fast growing season I will push my interseeding plant date forward. If we’re in a cool, dry season when things are slow growing, we’ll push planting back a bit,” he says.
7. Know your options. These practices do qualify for traditional crop insurance. “Contrary to what a lot of people will tell you, if you start tracking data, within 3 years you can apply for a waiver on your federal crop insurance. Read through the programs and they’ll explain how far you can bend the rules. The key, especially on interseeding, is that you’re able to manage the crops separately,” Steinlage says.
Early Learning
Minimal disturbance is critical for Steinlage. Early on, he tried broadcasting cover crop seeds and then running a rolling stalk chopper to incorporate the cover crop after harvest. He also tried using a rotary hoe.
“Then we went really crazy and decided to combine the two practices,” he says. He built a custom rig that would broadcast seed and allow him to interchange the rolling chopper for the rotary hoe. It worked great for seeding cover crops, he says, but it really excelled at germinating weed seeds. Now he uses practices that require minimal disturbance.
Mother Nature presented the opportunity for Steinlage to experiment and learn some valuable lessons about herbicide holdover and how it would impact interseeded cover crops and companion crops.
A wet spring in 2012 produced many drowned out spots and a lot of prevent-plant acres. Every week, Steinlage would seed a different drowned-out spot to his cover crop mix. He then monitored germination and growth.
PROFIT PUSHERS. Bin-run food grade winter wheat and bin-run food grade soybeans put seed costs at just $20 per acre and revenue equal to a 200-bushel crop of corn for West Union, Iowa, no-tiller Loran Steinlage.
“What I learned is that while Callisto is supposed to only have a 2-3 week residual effect, I was still seeing a burning effect 3 months after application,” he says. This insight led him to banding herbicide, directing it right at the base of the corn plant where weed pressure was the highest.
Steinlage wasn’t a newcomer to banding herbicide. Up to 1988 — prior to no-till — he would band-spray residual herbicide on corn and cultivate out the rest of the weeds. Knowing the impact of holdover residual herbicide on his interseeded crops, he added a band sprayer to his planter (more on that later).
He made a classic mistake with urea that resulted in another planter modification. “We put down a band of urea and then innerseeded our cover crop right on top of it,” he says. While the cover crop enjoyed the nitrogen (N), the corn was left wanting. “After that, we figured out how to Y-drop N onto the corn plant with the same drill.”
He’s since transitioned to using some 28% liquid N. With controlled traffic he can use his self-propelled sprayer to stream on UAN preplant and make sure it’s where the corn will be planted. The nozzles are spaced 20 inches apart with every third nozzle shut off. With the 30-inch twin rows he uses, this offsets the N 5 inches from the outside of each corn row, leaving 10 inches between the twin rows where another crop can be interseeded without competing.
“We never shot for the moon right off the bat. It was a slow, steady progression…” –Loran Steinlage
When interseeding cover crops, part of the challenge was figuring out what covers to plant in the rotation. He eventually settled on cool-season legumes and brassicas for corn-on-corn, cool-season grasses in corn going to soybeans and drilling twin-row winter wheat or barley just after harvesting soybeans when going to corn.
The Equipment
Success in intercropping has required plenty of equipment modification from drills to combines — a task Steinlage is comfortable tackling. After much experimentation, he’s created an equipment lineup that works well for his specific setup.
“One of the biggest things we figured out is that precision was going to be key for our innerseeded cover crops. As Steve Groff will say, ‘We need to treat our cover crop like our cash crop,’ so we decided to put seed sensors on and figure out how to monitor what we’re doing.”
Steinlage has built and rebuilt so many seeders he calls his current interseeder, which he built from scratch, ‘Number 10.’ He started with a Dalton liquid sidedress frame and worked with Dawn Equipment to customize its DuoSeed twin-row units.
He opted for a 1½-inch seed tube with an open shank to allow for swapping out different sized seed tubes if necessary. A seed firmer was added as well as a John Deere sensor with a 20/20 Precision Planting monitor. A large Montag seed box can handle four totes of seed to keep it moving in the field.
“Anytime we build, we build for capacity. I see guys building toolbars with 100-pound seed boxes. How many of us want to be handling all those small bags?” he asks.
For planting corn, he uses John Deere CCS planters. They needed to be tweaked for banding herbicide.
“We developed our own bracket based on our garage door opener lift arm to attach to the row units and apply herbicide behind the planter,” he says. Height was adjusted by trial and error until they achieved an 8-10 inch band used to apply residual herbicide at planting.
One setup is seeding soybeans into a cereal crop, such as spring malt barley or food-grade winter wheat. The wheat growing between the soybean rows is harvested in mid-July.
To avoid clipping the soybeans, Steinlage rigs blocker guards on the header. But he keeps it simple. He takes 1-foot pieces of drain tile that are slit down one side and then puts them on the cutter bar, spaced to block the sickles that will pass over the soybeans.
DOUBLE RELAY. Not content to get just two cash crops off of his fields, Loran Steinlage relay crops soybeans into cereals such as winter wheat or cereal rye. Once the wheat is harvested, he interseeds buckwheat into the grain stubble between the soybeans. The buckwheat attracts beneficial insects and is harvested along with the soybeans.
“Is it perfect? No. But we can make almost any head work quick as can be. With our undulating terrain, they last about 50 acres before they get broken up or pass through the combine,” he says.
As he’s scaled up companion cropping, he’s switched to a John Deere 1253 row crop header to harvest cereals while leaving the soybeans intact.
“We shifted the feeder house window 15 inches so our combine lines up on the rows,” he says.
Companion Cropping
Once confident with interseeding cover crops, a map from an Iowa Soybean Association (ISA) sponsored study on Steinlage’s farm sold him on the idea of trying relay — or companion — cropping.
“The first field-scale relay intercrop we did showed a 25% better return on investment than a 234-bushel per acre monoculture corn crop,” he says. “That got my attention.”
That wasn’t even the whole story. The ISA used university data for input, so on top of the 25% better ROI, he could factor in additional savings as he used bin-run cereal rye and bin-run food grade soybeans.
Since then, Steinlage has again proven the benefits. When he raises a cereal rye harvested for seed, a relay soybean crop and a relay buckwheat crop, it doesn’t take much to break even. To hit profitable numbers, he needs just a 30-bushel cereal rye crop harvested for seed at $10 per bushel, 30-bushel non-GMO premium soybeans worth $12 per bushel, and 400 pounds per acre of buckwheat valued at $0.30 per bushel.
“That works out to $820 per acre revenue, which is equivalent to a 200 bushel per acre corn crop at $4.10 per bushel. And history shows I can easily double those yields,” Steinlage says.
Plus, there’s the reduced risk.
“When we’re companion cropping food-grade wheat and food-grade soybeans, we’re at just $20 per acre in seed cost and getting two crops,” Steinlage says. Corn seed runs north of $100 per acre.
Additional profits may come from the quality of crops produced in a companion cropping system. In 2018, Steinlage’s soybeans came in at 39.65% protein when the U.S. average was 34.2%. With major markets such as China insisting on 35-36% protein soybeans, quality will pay, he says.
Timing Matters
Timelines are always a big question. When raising a companion crop of a cereal and soybeans, when should the soybeans be planted?
“As soon as the ground is fit,” he says. “And with the cereal crop in there growing and taking up moisture, we can actually get in a little sooner than usual.”
The next question is when should the relay crop — buckwheat in Steinlage’s case — be interseeded into the soybeans? It depends, he says.
WHAT IF. Playing the, ‘What If’ game and being comfortable adapting equipment can save the day when managing multiple cover crops and cash crops. When Mother Nature delayed cover crop termination in non GMO corn, Loran Steinlage had to be quick on his feet. He pulled an all nighter in his shop, adapting his drill to roller-crimp between the rows of growing soybeans.
In 2020, he drilled buckwheat into a soybean field just after the cleanup herbicide application. In prior years when the soybeans were relayed with a cereal crop, they’ve planted the buckwheat relay crop the same day the cereal crop was harvested.
“I want my relay crop to get a good start. One year we thought we hit it perfect, but the soybeans hit a sudden growth spurt and very little buckwheat made it through,” he says.
Besides being an additional crop, buckwheat has provided extra benefits by attracting pollinators and other beneficial insects. A friend pointed out that increased beneficial activity would help reduce soybean aphid populations.
Some of the timing takes care of itself. One field had some soybeans delayed due to being driven on.
“The buckwheat delayed itself with the soybeans so they matured together,” he says. The soybeans and buckwheat are direct cut together. Some of the buckwheat will survive, creating a cover crop, too. Sometimes a little too good of a cover crop, Steinlage says.
“In 2018 we had buckwheat show up on every acre from the previous year. We were all food-grade soybeans that year so I got a little nervous,” he says. A call to the processor revealed they would be easy to separate, so he just let it go. Once again, thinking and planning ahead helped him work through a potential problem.
As he’s dialed in his equipment and systems, Steinlage is moving confidently forward — while still not getting ahead of himself. Fortunately, the equipment setup he uses for interseeding cover crops also works to interseed companion crops.
“I’m geared up to go and more than half of my farm is going to be relay cropped in 2021. I figure we have all the pieces of the puzzle in place, so we’re going to start capitalizing now and working on the next big thing,” he says. And while it won’t be easy, Steinlage’s planned experiments with 60-inch rows, perennial cover crops and organic production will surely prove instructive.
To follow his progress and get more detailed looks at his equipment setups and practices, follow Loran on Twitter @FLOLOfarms.
