Mackane Vogel here with this week’s cover crop connection. Well cover crops and no-till are a match made in heaven and a few weeks ago I had a chance to visit with Loysville, Pa. no-tiller and innovative no-till manufacturer Charlie Martin. He showed me the latest no-till innovation he and his team have been working on and I even got a chance to see a live demo of the machine in action. Cover croppers are going to want to pay close attention here to this unique Plant Right minimum disturbance no-till drill. Here’s Charlie in the field to explain some of the special features. 

“So basically it goes in the soil, allows the soil to bubble up along the side of the disc blade, so that keeps our row compaction pretty much non-existent. And then we have our back wheel and closing wheel is all the same and it hits that and pushes most of the dirt in right behind the blade. The seed is dropped out right in front of the seed firmer and then there’s a reverse angle on the depth wheel, closing wheel to help close the trench, we can see that on the back side.”

“We have hydraulic down pressure on every row. This is a single acting cylinder on every row and they’re all tied together so we can set the pressure from 0 til we lift the machine up, which equals about 400 pounds of down pressure per row we can get until we get lift up. And we can also cut half the rows out and only put pressure on half of them which gives us 12-inch spacing. This is a 6-inch spacing drill and we have never built anything wider. We never had a request for — 6 inch spacing seems to be what they want.”

Charlie also notes that this is a narrow-transport machine that transports at just 8 and a half feet going down the road.

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