From No-Till Drills to Cover Crop Essentials, Ashland SWCD Has You Covered

Rising equipment prices are no fun for farmers. Combine that with wait lists of sometimes over a year, and finding the right farm equipment to help implement conservation practices on the farm and be a real challenge.

That’s why Ashland Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD) is working hard to make sure area farmers have access to the tools they need to achieve their conservation goals, and they are thinking outside of the box to do it.

In the 1980s, nearly every soil and water conservation district across the country offered no-till drills for farmers to rent. The idea what that farmers could try their hand and conservation tillage practices without having to make the hefty investment into new equipment they weren’t sure would work for them.

And while Ashland SWCD still offers no-till drills for rent today, those numbers are declining, not because the program didn’t work, but because it did. Soil and water conservation districts did such a great job of introducing farmers to no-till management that the majority of those farmers who used to rent no-till drills have invested in conservation tillage equipment themselves. Today, Ashland SWCD still rents their drills to  many Ashland area farmers, but many of those farmers are operating on smaller acreages where investing in their own equipment might not make financial sense.

That’s why this year, the Ashland SWCD board make a shift to their equipment rental line up and traded in their 5-year old 15-ft John Deere drill on a smaller 12-ft Esch drill with a swing tongue to make transport up and down Ashland County’s winding roads even easier. The new drill will join the district’s 2018 10-ft drill in servicing the farmers of Ashland County.

And to combat rising equipment prices, the board also increased their drill rental rates to $18/acre for the 2023 season with a $300 minimum for renting the 12-ft drill and a $150 minimum for renting the 10-ft drill. Rentals longer than 2 business days will also include a $20/day charge.

But while no-till drill rental has long been the district’s bread and butter when it comes to equipment rental, the district is excited to have more equipment available to offer farmers than ever before.

One of the fasted growing programs in the county is their cover crop program. To help farmers take their cover crop management to the next level, the district has partnered with the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD) to provide producers access to both a 15-ft cover crop crimper/roller and a cover crop interseeder.

The interseeder is designed to allow farmers to plant their cover crops in June—about 6 weeks after planting their initial cash crop. The cover crop seed gets established, but as the cash crop’s canopy closes for the growing season, the cover crop’s growth is slowed. The advantage to this seeding method is that when the cash crop is harvested and the canopy is opened, the cover crop is already in place and established, preventing potential erosion from a bare field and eliminating the need to get back in the field to plant cover crops during a busy harvest season.

The cover crop crimper/roller, on the other hand, is designed to allow farmers to plant green into a growing cover crop in the spring.  Instead of relying on an herbicide burn down, the live, growing cover crop can help absorb and mitigate excess moisture from spring fields, and once it is crimped and rolled for termination, it provides a thick ground cover to help prevent weeds, protect seeds, and utilize the rainfall the crop needs for a successful season.

But crop farmers aren’t the only ones who can take advantage of the district’s rental program: the district also teamed up with MWCD to offer a 2022 Lancaster ground-driven manure spreader to rent. The spreader’s size is perfect for hobby farms and well as 4-H and FFA members who need to manage manure and can easily be pulled with a side-by-side, 4-wheeler or even a large garden tractor.

The district also offers a frost seeder mounted on a side-by-side for farmers looking to frost seed their pastures and live traps for those combatting pesky critters like raccoons.

For more information on Ashland SWCD’s equipment rental program, contact Katie Eikleberry at 419-281-7645 or visit ashlandswcd.com