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Cover crops are plants that are grown to improve soil health rather than being harvested for sale. They can reduce erosion, increase soil organic matter, improve soil fertility, and other benefits. Normally they are planted after the main crop has been harvested, but lots of vegetable fields are harvested too late in the fall or winter to plant cover crops then. This project focuses on designing small-scale interseeder equipment that farmers can use to interseed cover crops into vegetable fields before harvest. Farmers are keen to interseed cover crops, but affordable interseeding equipment for small and mid-sized farms isn’t available. We are working to adapt existing equipment with a customizable  design to work on other equipment for interseeding cover crops.

The equipment we are modifying for our project is a Mechanical Transplanter inter row fertilizer spreader. Some of the requirements for our modifications were all based on the idea for it to be flexible for the equipment  that it is attached to and fields it will be used in. We want it to be able to be pulled by a 50hp sized tractor, so a smaller tractor or farm would be able to use it. For an economically achievable design, we have kept the total cost below $2000 dollars and have only used simple manufacturing techniques that can be performed in a basic farm shop. We wanted it to be adjustable for the width of the alleys between rows so that it can be tailored to each farm. We wanted it to have a good seed to soil contact with the design’s cultivation and compaction method to increase the odds of germination. Finally we wanted to make sure that our mechanism would only benefit a field by planting cover crops and not hurt them and that is why we have incorporated a high tool bar cleared and crop shield to protect the crops. With those design requirements, we have worked to develop the design presented below.