Ok, good stuff, as I suspected it appears closure and seed coverage is a problem. When I was researching the various models available I could tell everyone had their own idea about what works best. Even the AG boys like JD or GP that use large angled plastic wheels to collapse the side of the trench have invented upgraded all metal star wheels to try and improve this issue. There are several research papers written on the subject. All that said, I knew that when I bought the tar-river model I would have to modify it, because their solution is a spring loaded flat piece of metal, which will never reach the ground in a no till situation where you have a large amount of thatch build-up, or unlevel ground. I am working on a wheel type replacement. One interesting note is that tar-river sells a seed drill, though not listed as "no-till" and they attach a small cultipacker to the back, which doesn't seem to make sense because they talk about using it in semi-tilled soil. Thanks for the input guys,
Let's move on to the second part of this series. So some of you have jumped ahead with your answers but what I want to hear is about your first-time planting with it... I assume you all sprayed first with Gly and then planted. But in area, on my summer plots, the weeds will still come back with a vengeance by early summer. You can't spray again without wiping out everything, so...
1. What did you plant first?
2. How did you get around the issue of weeds over-taking your crops?
When we first got it the target was RR forage beans with a light mix of corn. The Kasco seed metering system was great for mixes, even with large seed like this. The RR crops solved the weed issue "temporarily anyway". We sprayed gly according to the directions for RR crops. We had high deer numbers at the time, The combination of browse pressure and weed competition would not allow the beans to canopy until I got up between 5 and 7 acres. At that point, there was enough beans that the deer could not keep up with the eagle beans and post plant spraying of gly kept the weed competition down enough for the beans to canopy and shade out weeds.
This worked great for a few years...but... Note the "temporarily anyway". We had a pine thinning in an adjacent area. We then burned the thinned pines. With the light getting to the ground with the thinning and burning of the pine straw, the native seed bank took off. It had marestail in it. Since the burn was about 100 acres, we could not control the marestail in the pines and it went to seed.
Marestail is naturally resistant to glyphosate. So, with multiple spraying of gly for burn down and post planting, the marestail was significantly advantaged over other weeds. The problem got worse, even when we targeted the marestail with labeled herbicides during burn down.
This changed may focus to weed management and I started to do a deep dive into it. My entire philosophy changed concerning deer management. Prior to this, my target was a clean, high yield farm field fit for a magazine cover. I began to learn the difference between farming and deer management as far as food plots go. Many of the farming techniques can be applied to food plots, but the objectives are quite different.
For a farmer, yield is king. Anything he doesn't plant is a weed as it detracts from his yield. Because he is has to harvest and is limited by the equipment for efficiency, he has to plant monocultures. This means he has to dump a lot of commercial fertilizer into his fields to compensate for all of the nutrients removed by harvest. Monocultures all want the exact same nutrients (and micro nutrients) from the soil. High yield is what makes farming profitable.
Things are completely different for a deer manager. First, for QDM, our food plots are not needed to replace native foods. Only a small fraction of a deer's diet comes from our food plots. They are intended to supplement native foods. So, our crops should be targeted toward stress periods when the quality of most native foods drop as the senesce. Depending on location that is either winter, summer, or a mix of both. Our crops should be providing quality food when nature does not. That does not mean that deer won't eat our crops when there is quality natural food. Deer are browsers, not grazers. They will move along and take a few bites of all kind of plants. They do focus on specific plants for short periods. So, if there is plenty of quality native food available, and a deer eats from our food plot instead, we have done nothing to advantage that deer. We have just substituted one quality food for another so the deer has no net gain. When we provide that nutrition during periods when nature is stingy, we help fill those gaps.
So, a successful food plot for QDM is not a pretty magazine monoculture, it is a plot that delivers nutrition when nature is stingy. What about yield? QDM requires scale and a typical deer home range is in the ball park of 1,000 acres. So deer will be eating foods from that entire area over the course of a year. If there is still quality food left in my food plot (given I have sufficient acreage planted for my deer density) at the end of the stress period, then the food plot had sufficient yield and did it's job.
Since yield is not a big factor for a deer manager, what is a weed? Many plants that are "weeds" for farmers are great high quality deer food. Granted there are noxious weeds that don't benefit deer, and when they begin to dominate like the marestail example above, they need to be dealt with, But, in general, a healthy mix of weeds in a food plot can be a beneficial thing for a deer manager.
So back to how I dealt with the marestail problem. First, I realized I was only making the problem worse with repeated use of glyphosate. I needed a different way to deal with the problem. The answer was a smarter choice of crops for my summer stress period along with a change in herbicides. I began to use a generic version of Liberty herbicide which is labeled for marestail for burn down. Next, I waited until much later in the spring and planted a mix of buckwheat and sunn hemp. Sunn hemp is a legume that can fix a lot of N into the soil. It is a highly nutritious plant for deer. Deer tend to use but not abuse buckwheat like they do soybeans. Buckwheat is sometimes called green manure because it scavenges nutrients and then decomposes quickly releasing them for the next crop. Both buckwheat and sunn hemp are fast germinating annuals. Neither requires a no-till drill or tillage. They can be surface broadcast and cultipacked and get great germination. The ideas was to smother the marestail.
It took a few years, and I still have a little marestail, but it is in balance with my other weeds and it does not dominate. I now rotate the use of gly and generic Liberty for burndowns. Some weeds will develop resistance to Liberty over time with repeated use just like the gly-resistance problem we now have in many ag areas.
So, the answer for me was "Weed Tolerance" and smarter crops selection.
