Victory World Inova

On a sunny day in late March when the neighbors are prepping their planters, you can find Trey Hill planting corn into a foot of green clover, cereal rye, and a mix of other cover crops.

The Rock Hall, Maryland, the farmer uses cover crops on all of his 13,000 acres and he plants green into the majority of them. And he does it without sacrificing yields. (At the right, Harborview Farms is planting corn into a rape and clover cover crop mix.)

“We’ve run strip trials the last three years comparing green vs. brown planting for soybeans. The beans are yielding about 10 bushels higher in green,” says Hill, whose beans average 60 to 70 bushels per acre.

Hill’s success comes from starting small, experimenting, and then adopting practices across the entire operation at Harborview Farms, named for the farm’s proximity to the Chesapeake Bay. Hill and his father, Herman, along with their 10 full-time employees, focus on environmental practices that make agronomic and business sense.

Harborview Farm’s first foray into planting green was, as Hill describes it, “by accident” and a “hot mess.” Only the headlands were sprayed in a field with a thriving cover crop before a rainstorm moved in. When it was time to plant the field, the headlands were brown and the rest of the field was a bright green. “We didn’t want to spray it then, because we’d have to wait a week or two to plant and then work up the field,” says Hill. “So, we decided to plant unconventionally – we just planted it and sprayed it afterward.”
What they found impressed everyone, even George Wilson, who has worked at Harborview for more than 36 seasons. “This is planting beautifully,” he told Hill while he was planting that field almost 10 years ago. “Don’t kill more cover crops. This is the best no-till field I’ve ever planted.”

While the brown headlands were too wet, resulting in sidewall compaction and an open trench, the green, as Wilson said, planted beautifully. This revelation not only changed Harborview’s planting strategy, but it also changed the farm’s approach to tillage.