The choppers are coming. The choppers are coming.
And 19 Franklin County farmers are waiting for the cover crops that the helicopters will be seeding, quickly but carefully, on their corn and no-till pumpkin fields in the next few days.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service program, which subsidizes the voluntary aerial seeding of cover crops to ensure healthier soil, allows farmers to get winter rye and other protective crops planted during the growing season, before primary crops are harvested.
Farmers in Deefield, Colrain, Sunderland and Northfield as well as Buckland, Conway, Gill, Greenfield, Orange and Whately are expecting their feed corn and pumpkin fields will be seeded with a mix of winter rye, oats and forage radish sometime over the Labor Day weekend.
But the federal agency says there should be minimal interference with holiday barbecues or other events.
“The operation is very fast,” according to NRCS spokeswoman Diane Bedeker Petit, who said that without aerial seeding, provided under the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, farmers would be forced to manually seed their fields. “If residents hear any noise from the helicopter, it will be brief. It usually takes about 30 minutes to seed a field, then they move on to another farm.”
The process uses a Global Positioning System to precisely map where the seed is distributed.
The crew, which moved from Worcester County to Berkshire County on Wednesday and was scheduled to plant eight Hampshire County fields Friday, Sept. 1, depending on weather conditions, could begin work Saturday in Franklin County, she said. The crew is even prepared to do the aerial seeding Sunday and on the Labor Day holiday because of the time-sensitive nature of the planting.
“The sooner they do it, the more established the cover crop will be before winter,” said Deerfield farmer Stephen Melnik, is counting on having about 400 acres of feed corn seeded from above over the next few days.
“This is the ideal time to seed, right now,” Melnik said. “Labor Day weekend is when you’d ideally like to seed, it but probably we’re not going to harvest for another three weeks.
“This year, especially, with the cold, wet spring, and it really hasn’t been a hot summer, so the corn is maturing slowly,” he added. Instead of beginning to chop corn around Sept. 7, it may not be ready for a couple of weeks of later, he said, “so we really want to get this stuff in the ground at the beginning of September, not the end,” so it will begin germinating with the next heavy rainfall.
By the time Melnik and his crew at Bar-Way Farm begin cutting the corn, the cover crop should already be growing.
Petit said that while last year’s planting of winter rye didn’t germinate well because of extremely dry soil due to lack of rain, “conditions should be pretty good this year.”