Not always. If you have a tractor, the disc and cultipacker are already in the shed, and the plot is flat, open ground you are putting into cereal grain or clover, that outfit plants a good food plot. Keep using it. It is not your problem. A no-till food plot earns its keep on ground you cannot or should not work. Slopes, waterways, a wet corner, a small plot behind a gate, a thin stand you want to keep, native seed. Tillage has a cost even where it works. Iowa State puts it at about a quarter inch of soil moisture per pass. Every pass also wakes the weed seed, and loose dirt buries small seed too deep unless you firm it first. Plenty of people end up running both.
Key Takeaways
- On flat, open ground a tractor can reach, a disc and a cultipacker still plant a good food plot.
- Every tillage pass costs soil moisture. Iowa State puts it at about a quarter inch a pass.
- Discing wakes the weed seed bank, one season of trouble in a food plot, several in a native planting.
- Small seed needs a firm seedbed. If your boot sinks more than half an inch it is going in too deep, and natives want it firmer still.
- You do not have to pick a side. A drill runs on worked ground once it is firmed, and your cultipacker still has a job.
Will a disc and cultipacker plant a good food plot?
Yes. I want to say that before anyone selling drills talks past it.
Mississippi State’s food plot guidance lays the conventional method out plainly: spray what is growing, disc a few weeks ahead, disc again, drag it smooth, roll it firm with a cultipacker, then broadcast the seed. For oats, wheat, rye, and clover on open ground, that is a working plot, and a lot of good plots go in that way every fall. There is nothing wrong with it on the ground it was built for.
The disc also does jobs a drill will never touch. It breaks new ground, cuts a firebreak, and opens a plot that went to brush. If those tools are in the shed and already doing that work, throwing them out to buy a drill is not a trade. It is a mistake.
The anti-drill side has a fair point or two as well. Plotmaster, which sells an all-in-one food plot implement, publishes that no-till drills run $8,000 to $18,000 and that most need a 40 to 70 horsepower tractor. The price range fits a lot of the market, ours included. The tractor part does not, and we will come back to it. But if you own the tractor and the ground is flat, the disc is not your problem, and I will not pretend it is.
What does working the ground actually cost you?
Start with the trips. Spray, disc, disc again, drag, cultipack, seed, cultipack again. That is six or seven passes over the same ground before anything comes up. Next to the yard it is a Saturday. Down a timber trail it is a Saturday plus hauling the tractor out and dragging it back.
Then the water. Iowa State extension soil specialist Mahdi Al-Kaisi puts every tillage pass at about a quarter inch of soil moisture, give or take with the soil texture and the residue on top. Nebraska’s number is higher, a half to three quarters of an inch per trip, per University of Nebraska CropWatch. Two disc passes in a dry fall can pull half an inch out of the seed zone right when the seed needs it.
The same Iowa State piece notes that disturbing soil in any condition breaks its structure and raises the erosion risk with the next rain. On flat ground you get a crust. On a slope, part of your plot ends up at the bottom of the hill.
I am not telling you to sell the disc. I am telling you to know what each pass costs before you make it.
Why do weeds come up thicker after you disc?
Because you told them to.
Most weed seed is small, and small seed waits for a sign that the ground is open. SARE’s handbook Manage Weeds on Your Farm lists the signals: light, warm soil, big swings between day and night temperatures, a little nitrate. Tillage hands them all over at once, and even rolling buried seed up into the light for a second is enough for a lot of species. Their bottom line is that a flush of weeds usually follows tillage.
In an annual food plot you can mostly live with it. You are back with the disc next year anyway, and a thick stand of cereal grain hides a lot of weed.
A native planting is a different deal, because you are not starting over next year. One pasture-to-prairie guide, written by a Pheasants Forever Farm Bill biologist for an Indiana conservation district, puts it bluntly: do not till if you can avoid it. The flush that follows can outcompete what you planted. If you do till, the guide says to spray again once that flush hits six to eight inches. That is one more trip, and on a dormant seeding it can push planting back to spring.
Why does small seed fail on freshly disced ground?
Depth. Small seed carries very little energy. Start it too deep and it runs out before it finds daylight, and the plant never shows up.
Mississippi State puts clover at no deeper than a quarter inch, small grains at about half an inch. Native grass and wildflower seed sits at the same depth or shallower. The pasture-to-prairie guide caps it at a quarter inch, says shallower is better, and names tillage as the usual reason it ends up too deep.
Fluffy ground does it to you without any warning. Seed falls into the gaps, the first rain settles dirt over the top, and seed you meant to barely cover ends up buried. That is why the conventional method runs the cultipacker twice. Once to firm the seedbed, once to press the seed in.
The check takes no tools. Walk the plot before you seed it. NRCS seeding specifications call a seedbed firm when your footprint sinks no more than half an inch. Natives want firmer. For prairie seeded into tilled ground in Iowa, NRCS says your footprint should not sink more than an eighth of an inch, and it calls rolling critical for keeping forb seed shallow. Sinking past your boot sole? Roll it again before a dollar of seed goes down.
Can you plant native seed with a disc, a spreader, and a cultipacker?
You can. The kit was built for food plots, though, and native seed shows the difference.
The spreader is the weak spot. A Purdue Extension piece attached to that same pasture-to-prairie guide names two problems with running native mixes through a cyclone spreader. Fluffy seed is too light to flow, and seeds of different sizes settle out and spread unevenly. The fix is a carrier: pelletized lime, cracked corn, or oats, mixed in for weight. It works. Their own example sets a spreader to throw about six pounds of seed an acre buried in two hundred pounds of lime, so you are hauling the lime more than the seed.
Broadcast native seed also calls for a heavier rate than drilled seed, to make up for the seed that never reaches soil. The guide to choosing a seed drill for small acreage runs the published numbers. On a diverse native mix, that difference gets expensive fast.
So yes, a disc and a spreader can put in a prairie. They just ask more of you than oats and clover do.
Where does a disc fall short?
On ground it cannot reach, or ground it should not touch.
- Slopes. A worked hillside left bare is how topsoil moves downhill. It is also no place to sit sideways on a tractor.
- Waterways and ditch banks. Too wet to get onto in spring, and the worst ground to leave bare before a hard rain. A disc in there in April is a story that does not end well.
- Small plots behind a gate. A half-acre opening down a timber trail is not worth hauling a tractor and a disc out for, and you may not be able to turn around in it once you get there.
- Existing stands. A disc cannot add seed to a thin clover plot or a pasture without tearing up what is already there. A drill slots seed in and leaves the rest standing.
- No tractor. Plenty of people with good habitat ground do not own one, and everything above assumes you do.
That list covers most of the ground people call us about. It is also the ground that gets planted last, if it gets planted at all.
Is a no-till food plot really one pass?
No. Whoever tells you that skipped a step.
Plotmaster is right that no-till almost always needs a herbicide burndown first. Drill into living sod and you plant seed into competition it will lose. NRCS native planting guidance for crop stubble has you spraying glyphosate five to seven days before planting. Old pasture sod takes more. The pasture-to-prairie guide figures two to four herbicide applications to convert it.
Look where Mississippi State’s tillage method starts, though. With spraying. The herbicide trip shows up in both systems. What no-till drops is the disc, the second disc, the drag, and most of the cultipacking. Weed control moves to before seeding instead of during it.
No-till does not fix everything, either. If a hardpan is why nothing grows on a spot, a drill will not break it. That takes mechanical work first, and the case for no-till seeding says it outright.
Do you have to pick one?
No, and this is the part that gets lost when the argument turns into a forum fight.
Keep the disc for what only a disc does, breaking new ground and cleaning up a plot that got away from you. Use a drill wherever you would rather not tear things up, including plots you worked once and want to keep in clover.
A drill runs fine on worked ground, as long as you firm it first. The pasture-to-prairie guide says that if you till, you have to cultipack or roll before you plant. That goes for a drill too. Fluffy ground swallows seed no matter what put it there.
Keep the cultipacker around as well. NRCS seeding specifications say a drill without packer wheels should have a cultipacker or roller trailing it. Rolling after a small-seed planting is cheap insurance, drill or no drill.
Where the Dew Drop Drill fits
If you have a tractor, a disc, a cultipacker, and five flat acres you put into clover and oats every fall, keep doing what you are doing. We would rather say that than sell you something you do not need.
The Dew Drop Drill is for the rest of that list. Three feet wide, pulled behind an ATV or UTV, 450cc or larger for hilly ground, so it goes where the four-wheeler goes. The guide to what size ATV or UTV you need explains why engine size is not really the limit here.
The part that matters for this argument is the disc mount. Twelve offset discs sit in two rows, set at 0, 10, or 20 degrees, cutting up to three inches. Straight, they slice a path for seed with as little disturbance as possible. Angled, they loosen the surface the way any offset disc does, in a three-foot band. Ten spring harrow tines behind them fold the seed in. One machine can plant into sprayed sod, or rough up a bare spot and seed it in the same trip. Light tillage, not primary tillage. It will not bust a hardpan or turn a sod field over. That is still the disc’s job.
It has no packer wheels, which is the plain reason to keep your cultipacker around for clover and natives. Roll after a small-seed planting on soft ground, or the seed goes in too deep.
The large seed box runs five picker wheels and five agitators, there for fluffy native seed that bridges in a plain hopper. The small box meters small seed through five fluted cups, alone or with the large box. Both are ground driven, so your rate does not move with your speed. You still calibrate for each seed lot.
It sells direct from the shop in Spencer, Iowa, for $9,395 plus shipping. Three feet is three feet. Forty open acres? Rent the big drill. This one is for the ground neither the big drill nor the disc ever got to.
FAQ
Can you plant a no-till food plot without a drill?
Yes. Some people spray, broadcast seed into the dying growth, and mow it down over the top so the thatch covers the seed. It can work for small seed. Clover can also be frost seeded into thin ground in late winter, and the dormant and frost seeding guide covers which seed suits that. A drill is the most consistent way to get seed into soil at a set depth, not the only way.
Which is better for a food plot, tilling or no-till?
Neither one every time. Tilling makes sense on flat ground you already work, and on a new plot breaking out of sod or brush. No-till makes sense on slopes, wet ground, small plots, stands you want to keep, and any year you are short on moisture. Most people who plant every year use both.
Do you have to spray before a no-till food plot?
Almost always. A drill places seed. It does not kill what is growing. NRCS native planting guidance puts glyphosate down five to seven days ahead on crop stubble, and established sod takes more than one application. Mississippi State starts its tillage method with spraying too. Follow the label on whatever you use.
Can you run a no-till drill on ground you just disced?
Yes, once it is firm. Roll or cultipack first and do the boot test. If your print sinks more than half an inch, or more than an eighth of an inch for native seed, a drill buries seed just like a spreader and drag would.
Do I still need a cultipacker if I buy a drill?
If the drill has no packer wheels, keep it. NRCS seeding specifications call for a cultipacker or roller behind a drill without them, and rolling after clover or native seed improves seed-to-soil contact on soft ground.
Still deciding?
Start with what is already in the shed and the ground you have not gotten to. If the disc and cultipacker reach everything you want planted, you are set, and you should not be buying anything from us. If there is a slope, a waterway, or a plot behind a gate that keeps getting skipped, send us a note with what you plant, what you would pull a drill with, and what equipment you already have. We will tell you straight whether this machine fits, and sometimes the answer is no.