Ray McCormick’s idea to fasten a small air seeder on his combine to seed cover crops while harvesting cash crops is picking up steam across the Corn Belt.

Two no-tillers who adapted a similar one-pass system on their farms share how they did it.

Petersburg, Ill., no-tiller Harry Schirding installed a Gandy Orbit-Air 1018 No-Till air seeder on his Gleaner S68 combine to seed annual ryegrass while harvesting no-tilled soybeans.

The air seeder is fastened to the soybean header. The seeder was originally calibrated to run at 3 mph but Schirding says he never really just drove 3 mph. “We were trying to get 15 pounds of seed an acre on, but got more than that because we didn’t cover all the acreage,” says Schirding, who no-tills 1,350 acres of corn and soybeans.

Timing Challenge

Last year, Schirding installed a variable-speed drive on the seeder that lets him control the air seeder’s speed with a tablet. Plastic tubing routed under the combine transports ryegrass seed from the seeder to nine flutes that deposit the seed onto the soil behind the soybean header, where it’s subsequently covered up by soybean straw and chaff.