Converted air seeder efficiently plants cover crops

SHELLSBURG, Iowa — Kyle Schminke deep tills all his farm ground. However, it is not done with a tractor and tillage equipment.

“I do it with a living organism,” he said about the 3,000 acres he farms in Iowa. “We’ve dug samples and there are roots 30 inches deep.”

Every time a root goes through the ground, Schminke said, it is busting through the pan pack.

“When the root dies, it shrinks and now there’s an opening, so you’ve created a giant sponge,” the farmer said.

“We’re always the first to plant because our ground has such porous,” he said. “This field has not seen a disc since 1979 and it will do just as good as any other field, but you have to be totally committed to no-till, and if you don’t have the right equipment, you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

Schminke plants a cover crop on 100% of the acres he farms.

“We mainly do wheat or rye and we’ve also done hairy vetch, clover and oats,” he said.

To plant cover crops, Schminke uses an air drill that he converted to fit his operation.

“When this air seeder became available, we went from a 15- to 40-foot piece of equipment and that changed everything for us because now we have the technology to do it,” Schminke said.

“You probably won’t find another drill around here like mine because it is more of a western machine,” he said. “It ended up in our area and we were able to do what we wanted it to do.”

Schminke starts planting the cover crops as soon as the corn or soybean field is harvested.

“I have one guy and that’s all he does,” Schminke said. “He starts the day we start combining.”

“The growing season is short so the cover crop will only grow to about 3 inches tall, but in the spring it really kicks up,” he said.

“For every inch the cover crop is above ground, it’s a couple of inches below ground, so you might not get 100% erosion control, but it’s better than nothing,” Schminke said. “The thing that helped us the most was the first year we did it to scale, it really worked well.”

“The crop we’re harvesting is the most important and the cover crop is the cherry on top,” he said. “You have to be committed to getting the cover crop planted in a timely fashion and it takes a lot of extra effort to do it.”

“There’s a reason why only 7% of total acres are planted with cover crops in the U.S.,” said Paul Scheetz, director of climate smart ag origination for ADM. “There’s a productivity risk that’s associated with the timing of planting your next crop.”

“Kyle’s machinery that’s able to offset some of that risk is significant because it’s one of the biggest concerns when farmers are looking to plant a cover crop,” Scheetz said.

There are three corn processing plants located in Cedar Rapids, 30 minutes away from Schminke’s farm.

“I chose ADM because of the relationships I have, and they not only buy my products, they sell me the products I need for inputs,” the farmer said.

“There is a level of trust, so when they came to me about the regen program, it worked well with what we were already trying to do,” he said.

ADM started to focus on sustainability in 2012 when a downstream customer asked them to work on a program in Iowa.

“It was a fact-finding mission because we knew there was no way we’re going to dictate practices because every field, climate condition and commodity is different,” Scheetz said. “We wanted to understand some of the best practices.”

From 2012 to 2021, ADM conducted several pilot projects to collect information.

“We got feedback from farmers on how to design a good program,” Scheetz said. “We wanted to scale up our efforts to show markets and downstream customers that this can get to scale and farmers will adapt it if there’s a financial component and contracts are flexible.”

In 2021, the company went from a pilot to a scaled-up ADM re:generations program.

“This past year, we signed up 2.8 million acres globally,” Scheetz said. “That included 2.6 million acres in North America and 200,000 acres in other countries.”

This year, the goal for ADM is 3.5 million global acres and 5 million global acres next year.

“The term regen ag was not used that often three years ago, so we worked hard to come up with our definition,” Scheetz said. “It is an outcome-based approach that improves soil health, water quality, biodiversity and climate while keeping in mind farmer’s business decisions.”

The main principles of the regen program for ADM are minimizing soil disturbance, maintaining living roots, always covering bare soil, diverse crop rotations and responsibly managing inputs.

“It doesn’t mean every farmer has to fall within all five principles,” the ADM director said. “We look at crop by crop and region by region for the biggest opportunity.”

Scheetz expects the ADM re:generations program to change every year.

“If our program offering five years from now is the exact same as it is today, we’ve probably failed,” he said. “We want to make sure we’re evolving with the farmer.”

“In general, we incentivize cover crop adoption, no-till, double crops and we have nitrogen use efficiency targets,” he said.

“We have an emission score payment for corn, soy and canola that sets benchmarks for each crop and farmers get paid premiums on the crops they deliver to us if they fall below the carbon intensity thresholds.”

Farmers have options with the ADM re:generations program.

“You do not have to be a cover crop farmer or a no-till farmer,” Scheetz said. “You can be a conversation tillage farmer or work specifically on fertilizer efficiency and there’s so much innovation happening at the field level around biologicals and cover crops that you can harvest.”

“People would call us on the verge of being odd, but we think out of the box,” the farmer Schminke said. “We’re not doing a normal program and we don’t care what other people think because it’s worked for us.”