With my wife, Carrie, and son, Alex, we’re fifth and sixth generation farmers. When we got into strip-till and no-till, it was shortly after we ran into Ray Rawson at the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville. We were looking to get away from traditional types of tillage and liked his philosophy on things.

Our first real strip-till experience was in 1988 following a severe drought. From February to July of that year, there was no rain and the ground was like concrete. We had a field with winter killed sod and alfalfa stubble, so we needed something else for feed because we were a dairy farm at the time.

We had a John Deere 7000NT planter with unit mounted no-till wavy coulters. Where it was mellow, we got the planter in and ended up with normal looking corn. Our hills remained too hard and we had no germination on them. With conventional tillage we ended up with waist-high, 50-bushel corn. The field with normal looking corn left us thinking there was merit to the system, but we needed better equipment to get moving.

We sat on the sidelines until 1992 when we bought a different planter. It was another 7000NT planter that had Yetter equipment, wavy coulter row units and a notched coulter in the front for fertilizer placement. We also built a weight bracket for suitcase weights to get it in the ground.

To start, we took two test fields on the farm and ran an experiment. One was 46 acres, highly erodible, C and D slope with decent yielding ground. The other was a 28-acre field and our worst ground — A and B slope soil, heavy gumbo clay, lots of rocks and really wet. We were hoping for a positive budget response, thinking we would sacrifice a little yield but save on tillage. We ended up with a yield bump.

As our yields went up, we thought we should continue on with what we were doing. In 1994 we bought our first strip-till unit, a Rawson zone till. We got our seed in the ground, got our stands and everything looked good. Then, when we got optimum to low fertility levels, our corn ran out of gas.

After a few years of yield drag, we tried broadcasting potassium (K) on top and then tried plots with higher rates — but none of it worked. We then went to Rawson’s farm in Farwell, Mich., to look at his banding setup. Our clay soils do not allow efficient use of K unless banded.

Rawson told us we needed to band our K because it was laying on the surface and unavailable. We purchased a dry fertilizer kit he designed for the Rawson zone-till machine and then we banded our K. We got back to normal rates of K and our yields took off again. That was the end of our K deficiency.

Success Through Experiments

In our area, east central Wisconsin, we have heavy gumbo clays, but we farm it. We have to watch how deep we band the dry fertilizer because it’s all weather dependent and we try to run it as deep as possible without creating a lot of mud balls. In the spring with the lake effect climate, we're so close to Lake Michigan that the whole world seems to be planting before us.

We always found ourselves waiting while everybody else was planting with conventional tillage, drying the ground from the top while we had that seal that occurs over the winter months and the spring months. With strip-till and no-till, there’s moisture conservation, but if we could strip those zones, they dry out in a couple of hours. We were waiting for dry ground for weeks at a time and we needed a better approach, so we started investigating pre-zoning.

From there, we experimented with Rawson’s deep-till unit and we got involved with the University of Wisconsin Madison and soil scientist Dr. Richard Wolkowski on some test plots.

The test plots were on a 20-acre field for 4 years with 2 years of soybeans and 2 years of corn. The field was 3-by-3-by-3 block of replicated plots with 30-inch strip-till. We also did thousand-foot machine harvested strips and I had block samples harvested by hand in order to take harvest machine loss out of the equation. We strip-tilled with the zone builder in the fall and without it in the spring. We then compared it to DMI Ecolo-Tiger conventional tillage.

With soil penetrometer readings and bulk density measurements, they found that over the 4 years, we took the plow sole, or hardpan, that we took out with the DMI Ecolo-Tiger and by running it at the same depth over 4 years, we were starting to create a new plow sole at 14 inches deep. This meant that we could not run that tool every year at the same depth.

The final result of these test plots was the zone builder on top all 4 years and DMI Ecolo-Tiger at the bottom. We were hoping for a financial response and ended up getting a yield response with soybeans having a difference of around 10-bushel an acre.

We went through most of our ground twice and got the plow sole out so we do not use the zone builder anymore. We leave it alone because we have a huge stone problem in this area and as our soil gets deeper, it gets coarser and extremely stony. Once, we had a 20-acre field that was so bad with stones that it took us 3 days to windrow it with a rock rake and pick it with a rock picker.

Today, we strip-till twin-row corn and soybeans using our strip-till unit 24 hours ahead of the planter. If we’re in a dry period, we’ll shorten that up to half or a quarter of a day after strip-tilling. We run a second soybean planter when we plant beans, and we like to plant them first and corn second. We found a yield advantage by planting soybeans early. The second planter is a 15-inch planter with two Rawson coulters per row.

We don’t have specific crop rotations, but we don’t do any corn-on-corn for grain. When planting grain corn, we try to grow it on our best ground. With soybeans, we’ll rotate with wheat and try to get wheat on our highly-erodible land (HEL) ground.

We use the 30-foot Blu-Jet CoulterPro for light vertical tillage to break the seal on the ground on our wet soils. We run that ahead of everything if the field requires it. If the field is dry come planting, we skip it and just run the planter. Usually we can plant about 24 hours later after a pass with the CoulterPro.

For twin-row, we built an 8-row twin machine that’s Kinze row units on a modified John Deere bar. It’s essentially a Kinze split-row planter on 6-inch spacings instead of 15-inch. It’s got Rawson variable drives and Precision Planting vacuum meters. We also run one rubber press wheel and one spiked closing wheel on the back, because it’s performed better in strip-till conditions for us.

We replaced the dry fertilize kit with four 70-gallon liquid fertilizer tanks for phosphorus (P), partly because I couldn’t figure out how to make the dry kit work to apply fertilizer between the twin rows. We apply liquid P in a 2-inch by 2-inch placement on all 16 units of the twin-row planter.

Initially, we had a lot of difficulty getting the seed spacing right with the finger pickup seed mechanism because our ground speed was wrong.

The planter was designed for 30-inch rows and technically to get a 15-inch planter to work, we've got to drive our ground speed twice as fast. It's the wrong speed for our seed tube and we got too many stones, so we can't be doing that.

So we looked at taking every other finger out of the seed meter until we went to the Precision Planting vacuum meters. All totaled, we put the planter together for about $26,000 with variable-rate drive and RTK steering.

Cover Crop Conquest

When we were doing contract vegetables years ago, we experimented with cover crops and didn’t like them. The only thing we could get to work was oats or barley because it was dead in the spring. With our heavy clay soils, yields went down instead of going up, but with barley and oats, yields went up.

We’re trying rye again now. We harvest it for forage and spray it pre-harvest. We then cut and chop it for animal feed which seems to work. Overall in the system, we still get a yield dip because we have to come back and double-crop our corn or soybeans behind our rye and if we’re in a dryer than normal year, we’ll run out of moisture.

We’ve had times when the double-crop behind a rye strip-till showed hardly any yield drag and we’ve had times where there’s 3 tons of silage missing. That was always with corn. Now there’s new data in the area that soybeans after rye are working well so we will experiment with that now.

Tillage radishes were another cover crop we tried and have done well with. We seeded some on our best and worst soybean ground and saw a yield increase. We have expanded on that every year. Our typical average is 55-60 bushel soybeans, but one of our fields did hit 80-bushesl in 2017. They were 15-inch rows after turnip cover crops on our best soils.

Chemical Education

Weed control is extremely complex and a lot of people just don’t get it and it takes some effort to figure it out. A lot of people that have tried no-tilling or strip-tilling in my area, but they have quit because they couldn't make their chemical program work.

You'll quit for two reasons: One, yields suck due to potash deficiency, or two, dandelion control. They love high pH alkaline soils and if we don't control our dandelions, they'll haunt us. If you are strip-tiller or no-tiller in this area, your chemical program has to cover dandelions. That is number one, but there are not a lot of programs that work.

Our chemical program is on a field-by-field basis. Corn is a little easier to control dandelions in than soybeans, but with soybeans, we always use the Valor herbicide program. With corn, we use a Basis type family of herbicides that will work on dandelion. With this program, just about all our acres get that material somehow. Weed control was difficult when we started no-till because we did not have Roundup Ready crops. Instead, we used conventional chemistry.

We are sitting on dolomitic limestone, so we have pH composites in soil up to 8.2 and we have shallow soils, bedrock and sinkholes in some areas. The pH of the water even comes out of the ground at 7.2 in the area. When we spray, we need to use additives to lower the pH.

There was no data or information on the chemical application we were doing in our area and there were some issues which is one of the reasons I got my Agronomy license.

Nutrient Planning Pays Off

We band our K with the strip- till unit and P goes on with the planter and our rates have been as low as 60 pounds per acre of banded K and as high as 300 pounds per acre because the amounts vary according to soil tests and yield history.

We did test plot work with P on the seed in the trench vs. alongside the row. We had some pretty good plots that we did with using ammonium polyphosphate (10-34-0). We had zero stand loss and zero injury which you’re not supposed to be able to do without a food grade ortho true solution. But in arid conditions, we had stand loss with true solutions as well. Its all weather related.

Since GMO seeds came out, we will not apply P on the seed in the trench due to stand reduction. There is a lot of good data that shows P is beneficial as long as we can get it as close to the seed as possible without touching it. That’s difficult to do and while it can be done, we just don’t put P in the trench anymore.

On another note, seed treatments are so important right now. If you look closely at test plots and compare different companies with different seeds treatments, I think there's more of a yield difference on seed treatments than there is on a variety. You have to kind of match the seed treatment or what's going on in your soil.

Some say continuous soybeans are bad, but we've been having pretty good luck with them. We have to watch our genetic families and rotate our genetic seed stock. When we can beat some of the neighbors on our yields with continuous soybeans while they have first year beans, that’s good.

I’ve also found it’s easier to grow soybeans than corn in our lake effect climate. Corn is an expensive crop to grow and it is not always dry when we go to harvest it. Some years, we have to shell 30% or we get poor test weight in the corn.

We’ve been trying to push soybean yields all the time, and we have noticed on strip-till, we got a response by putting down K with the strip-till rig ahead of the twin-row planter, as well as a micronutrient foliar feeding.

The banded K has to be doing something for the soybeans. We tried high-application P on the soybeans, and we had bad luck. The plants grew too much foliage and the soybeans tipped over. We don’t need plants that are chest high and that’s what P does to them. We already have adequate P in our soil because we’re livestock-based. I feel that K in this part of the world is way more important than P for soybeans.

We have done some soybean plots in the past and we found that over-seeding soybeans is detrimental to yield. We tend to keep our soybean populations low. I’ve got a 50-acre field that we’ve gotten soybean populations down to 65,000 seed per acre compared to as high as 250,000, and the low populations have won out in terms of yield, when we’ve planted in April. With soybeans, the earlier we plant, the lower our population. The later we plant, the higher our population.

Precision with Purpose

We built our 15-inch strip-till planter that's still in use. All our planters have fluid drives and are on RTK. We have RTK units on three tractors which has made strip-till more fun and easier. In the past, we manually steered the zones which was harder with a twin-row planter. Now we’re doing strip-tilling and RTK on a budget.

We bought our John Deere 4700 sprayer and when they came out with the auto-steer, it was $30,000 for the system. With the price like that we decided to wait and follow auto-steer around a bit. When Trimble came out with the EZ-Guide 500s we looked for used ones.

EZ-Steer was around $2,000 and we can find an EZ-Guide 500 with unlocks for around the same price. We used a little electric EZ-Steer motor for our older tractors — we have every Deere 40 series model— and got RTK on them for about $4,000.

We run the signal off Bluetooth adapters and use a cell phone to transfer a CORS signal for the differential. There is a cell tower right on our farm and our RTK course tower is 5 miles from us. We now run the EZ-Guide systems in all our tractors and our sprayer.

Over the last 20 years, we have gotten the system running smoothly. With the use of the CoulterPro to help dry the ground we can go out and strip-till before the neighbors can do conventional tillage.

We have been 100% strip-till since 1999, and if we had to make a choice, we would quit farming before we quit strip-tilling. For us, it’s a win-win and we save a lot of soil.