How to Find and Set Seeding Rates for Cover Crops

0:09 All right I've got the seed. What's the seeding rate? How deep do I need to plant this? There's a lot of questions around how to plant cover crop seeds so this one I do want to spend a decent amount of time on so maybe we'll just piece this up. How do you find the seeding rate or the bushel weight on the cover crop seed that we send out?

0:31 Hey you want me to handle that Keith or well I'll handle that first part there. When you get and I don't know I'll throw one out and hold it up here as Dale's talking but when you get the seat analysis sheet it's going to save the seating rate right on there and that will tell you 30 pounds an.

0:53 Acre 40 pounds an acre and if you can't find that all you got to do is take the number of acres that you're doing the number of pounds of seed that you have and just do the math and you'll be able to tell very quickly what your seeding rate needs to be.

1:08 Setting the drill is going to be a little bit different deal. We are working on and probably won't be this year but next year on those analysis reports it's going to tell you what the bushel weight of your overall mix is going to be and again that's not going to tell you how to set your drill but it's going to be one factor involved in helping you get close and get started so that's what we're printing out and.

1:32 Providing on the papers that we send you and then once you get that then you have to actually get that applied to your drill so Dale go ahead and talk about several different ways that the customer can do that.

1:42 Yeah, I mean obviously there's no drill setting for a mixture of oats, peas, veg, radishes. You know, there just isn't one and so a lot of people are confused. Well, how do I set my grill? Well, box grills meter out seed not based on weight but on volume and the way we, you know, the English system and that and American agriculture of measuring volume is in bushels so it becomes important to determine what is your bushel weight well one way of.

2:25 Doing that is to have one of these handy dandy little bushel weight apparatus. And you know, you put seed in here and then you just move this little balance and it'll tell you your bushel weight. And then you basically find something, you know, similar on your chart of that bushel weight and set your drill that way.

2:55 And another way of doing it is to mathematically calculate. Go ahead, how much are those? I mean, where do you get those?

3:02 We sell them, but how do people get a hold of those? Well, I said yeah, you said it, we sell them. So how much are they?

3:14 They're like 65, so they're a nice investment because you can use those for planting wheat or oats or peas—they'll work for anything and they're really easy to use. They're made out of plastic, they're fairly tough, but I mean don't run over them. So if you have a toolbox or something on your drill, we just carry a big plastic toolbox bolted on the back of our drill and that just rides back there all the time, and it'll hold up for many, many years as long as you're not stepping on it or dropping it. So 65 bucks, and you just have to request it and we can send it out with the seed.

3:54 Mathematical calculation of about what your bushel weight is, and Noah, can I share my screen? I can kind of run through—I put about six, seven slides together that kind of go through the process.

4:32 Okay, so basically I just put an example here of an oat-pea blend, and so you want to convert this to bushels. So let's just say we have a mix—it's 94 pounds of seed per acre: 64 pounds of oats and 30 pounds of peas. How do you set the drill? So let's go through the procedure. So we want to convert that into bushels because drills don't plant pounds—they plant bushels, they plant a certain.

5:05 Volume. When you set them, so oats are 32 pounds of bushel. So the 64 pounds of oats is two bushels. The peas are 60 pounds of bushels, so 30 pounds is half bushel. So the is two total a half bushels and so you just set the drill to the approximate number of bushels, two and a half bushels would be 80 pounds of oats or 150 pounds of peas.

5:40 Two and a half times 32 is 80 for the oats. Two and a half times 60 is 150. Obviously two completely different numbers, but if you do both those settings you'll find out they're almost exactly the same drill setting even though they're dramatically.

6:45 A tape measure measuring tape on there as well. Whatever your drive will, if it's an end wheel or you know, measure that driveway, the distance around it.

6:57 Then raise the drill off the ground, whether it's three-point or jacks, whatever it takes to get that drill off the ground so you can spin the drive wheel. Place the tarp underneath the drill in the drive wheel. I like to do it a hundred times because it makes the math easier.

7:14 Weigh the seed that's in the tarp and then you just do the math. Your pounds per acre is you just plug it into this equation. Your pounds collected on the tarp and

7:31 The area is going to be your drill width, a 10 foot drill, 30 foot drill times your tire circumference. Your length, your width is of course the drill width, and the length that you travel during that calibration is going to be your tire circumference times the number of times you spun.

7:51 And there's 43,560 square feet of an acre, so you just convert that area that you planted to acres and that gives you your pounds per acre. So if anybody, you know, that this is going to be posted, so you can review this later if you need to.

8:16 And I'll note too, Dale and I have a plan here. We're going to try and get a drill calibration video made so that it'll be more in depth and we'll actually probably do that on our drill so that you'll be able to see that. And Dale very likely probably just sold about 50 of those little drill calibrators because if you want to want to go do all that math, just submit 65 bucks. And yeah, for those little deals it's really quick and simple to use.

8:49 Yeah, and I used to teach math and people say, 'Well, I'll just pay somebody to do this for me in the future.' That's what you're doing right there. That's what we're doing right there. So yeah, I found that.

9:06 Nobody has time to calibrate a drill, but everybody has time to drive 400 miles to get two more bags of seed. Yes, so it's better to calibrate than to run out and be scrambling and scraping for seed later.

9:25 It's on the paper and when you get your, especially if you're getting a tote bag, if we are shipping that and you look in the little plastic holder on the tote, it's going to have your address and the shipping label in there. You have to look behind it to get the seed analysis sheet and that's where the pounds per acre and eventually the bushel weight for the overall mix is going to be as well.

9:49 Most of those bags do not have multiple plastic holders, so we have to put both those pieces of paper in that one little ziploc bag holder thing on the tote.