growing maize probably isn't for me, i chuckled when you called the cob fat and girthy i hope it was ok

maybe consider trialing a living mulch of Alsike or Dutch white clover. Strip till into it (3-4" strips), then come back 3-4 days later and mow it fairly close (a couple days before the corn emerges). The mown residue will break down to start releasing N right about the time the corn emerges, and the nice thing about Alsike and Dutch white clover is that they spread rather aggressively with stolons, so by the time the corn is 6-12" tall, the short growing clovers can "heal" back over the strip tilled area (preventing annual weeds from getting out of hand and limiting erosion). If you end up liking that system, you could look at a taller growing clover to add in (they tend to fix more N than short clovers), and invest in interrow mowers on a toolbar for ground cover/weed management (plus, it adds a slow trickle of organic N throughout the season as you mow the interrow space). If you're running GPS, you can get really sophisticated and offset your tilled rows from year to year, so you don't keep tilling the same area year after year. If you wanted to rest that field for a year, you could seed an annual grass (like Sorghum-Sudan) into it and graze or hay it a few cuttings. If you really like the idea of vetch, you could trial an area by broadcasting it (by hand or with a cheap hand crank broadcaster) (maybe with some rye and radish) in late Aug- Late September in with your current crop (if it's corn, vetch will tend to smother beans) and see how you like it (bearing in mind that vetch is very winter hardy and is only reliably killed with mowing or roller-crimping when it's in the flowering stage, which is late May-early June in most places). I don't know how long a season you have in MT, but that might cause you some trouble when it comes to using vetch ( I didn't get it all killed in my sweetcorn some years back, and it caused me some trouble with climbing on top of the young corn). If you like how that is working, you could invest in a drop seeder rig for a highboy sprayer, so you can get through taller corn to seed your cover into it. Some people are also mounting gandy boxes to the combine to seed covers while they shell corn.