It may seem improbable and even Terry Dahmer admits his neighbors have thought it a bit unusual, but each spring you’ll find the Marion, Ill., no-tiller pulling a soybean drill through fields of cereal rye about 5 feet tall.

When it comes time to drill soybeans, the only thing you can see above the standing cereal rye is the tractor cab. That’s a situation that most growers would think is impossible for establishing a stand of soybeans.

“It gets pretty serious when it’s 5-and-a-half feet tall,” Dahmer says. “But I’m after organic matter with this cereal rye and it works real well for holding the moisture and holding weeds back.

“It looks real tough when you drill into it, but I haven’t had any troubles getting a stand.”

With some of his farmland in continuous no-till for more than 25 years, the southern Illinois no-tiller says using cereal rye as a cover is his latest effort to build organic matter.

“In this part of the country, we don’t have organic matter,” he says. “Even with no-till, we can’t seem to build it. It may be because it’s so warm down here. My objective with cereal rye has been to build organic matter.

“I’ve seen what I thought are some benefits. Last year, I had one cornfield that should have burned up, but it didn’t. The only thing I can come up as a reason why my neighbor’s corn was curling and mine wasn’t was because of the cereal rye cover…