Please take a look at the photo below and guess whether this is a well-established cover crop or just a thick, lush crop of a volunteer grain. The field was tilled once in late August, early September. The picture was taken on November 6th near Crookston.
You are today's winner if you guessed a lush volunteer crop of spring wheat. The headland immediately at the field entrance is thinner and anemic, as is the edge of the ditch. Otherwise, this volunteer spring wheat crop checks every single box for what you would want a cereal cover crop to look like in late fall.
And that is the point of this blog - this meets all the criteria of how a cover crop should look in late fall, other than it was not sown by an approved seeding operation, nor does it contain a companion species. You should know that both mechanical and pneumatic fertilizer spreaders, in combination with tillage, can qualify as approved seeding operations. It is not that far of a stretch, in that case, to consider a properly set straw spreader (one which covers the width of the header) on a combine as an approved seeding operation.
Source : umn.edu