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Noah Newman:

Come on in. Welcome to another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast. Great to have you with us, as always. I'm your host, Noah Newman, associate editor. Thanks to Yetter Farm Equipment for sponsoring the show. We'll have a special message from them later in the podcast.

Today, a trio of strip-tillers discuss their plans for 2023. John Stevens of Rock Creek, Minnesota, Ryan Nell of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, and Ryan Shaw of Snover, Michigan join me on stage at the Ninth Annual National Strip-Tillage Conference in Iowa City. Let's check out some of the highlights from the panel discussion. Roll tape.

All right guys, we're going to start with rapid fire here. What are you driving? What are you pulling? What are you planting?

Ryan Shaw:

We're pulling a 12-row SoilWarrior with Case IH Row Quad. We plant corn, soybean, sugar beets and some cereal rye.

Ryan Nell:

We use a 12-row Gladiator and a 12-row Dawn Gen Five Deere equipment for pulling. We plant corn, beans, and a little bit of wheat.

Noah Newman:

Gotcha. John?

John Stevens:

A Massey 8660 with a B&H bar and then corn, beans, barley, oats, wheat and hay.

Noah Newman:

Next question. Based on input costs today, what changes are you planning to make to your fertilizer and herbicide programs in 2023?

Ryan Shaw:

Last year, we built a band sprayer. We started band spraying some of our herbicides and actually some of our first leaf spot sprays over our sugar beets just to shorten the chemical load.

Noah Newman:

All right. Ryan?

Ryan Nell:

For herbicide, like for this year, with some of the shortages with cover crops, I wanted to make sure we weren't making any extra passes because of the covers. So we're changing our program a little bit there, not really adding extra costs, just more timing. Fertilizer, doing a little more crop removal right now rather than doing some builds, but we're looking at right now going to a 24-row with fertilizer on it for next year. I think we'll be banding, moving in that direction.

Noah Newman:

Gotcha.

John Stevens:

Herbicide, I think we might look into a wheat wipe for next year to see if that could bring any value to us and then just work harder on the proper timing. And then on the fertility plan, we set up a thing with Kempf here to do something, some trials next year, and then bring in more tissue sampling and just try to be more focused on the management side of it instead of just broad pounds. And then with the cover crops, bring in more natural fertility into the soil.

Noah Newman:

What environmental challenges are you looking at tackling in 2023? John, we'll start with you.

John Stevens:

Our environment, we're on the St. Croix Watershed, so we're 2 miles from the St. Croix River as the crow flies, just an hour north of several million people. We're looked at very heavily on the state and we really need to focus on runoff and erosion. If that's what you mean by environmental, yeah, yeah, that's a big concern for our area and a big driving force behind the whole soil health approach to where we're at.

Noah Newman:

How much of cover crops help with that?

John Stevens:

Oh yeah, yeah. The cover crops, that's making it happen. We took rain water infiltration tests that after three hours of watching water evaporate out of a cup, we now have spots that are 6, 8, 12 inches per hour after several tests. We can see on our ditches where we used to literally inner tube down the field ditches as a kid after a big rain event, now you walk out there and we have four inches in four hours and there's this much water in a ditch now.

We're getting that water into the soil and the shank machine of strip-till in our area with our soil is a huge add to the cover crops because the cover crops will slow the water down coming down the surface with the strip-till and the shank, tear that slot open and allow that water to get into that profile instead of going to the St. Croix.

Noah Newman:

All right. Ryan, yeah, same question. What environmental challenges are you looking to tackle next year?

Ryan Nell:

Not a whole lot really from what we changed from this last year. We really jumped into cover crops, cereal rye in front of soybeans for this last year. About 50% of our acres are covered in the fall. I don't know if we're going to increase that going on corn. I like it in front of beans, maybe not so much in front of corn. We're pretty much almost 100% fall strip-till the way it is. Not really changing a lot. Maybe more on the fertilizer side, trying to manage that band a little more than what we have been doing. But for the most part, not changing a whole lot from one year to the next.

Ryan Shaw:

We never move our zone. We're always planting in the same strip all the time. Last year, we didn't put enough priority on getting over our twin-row corn stalks, making the strips over them, and we couldn't make up that time in the spring because a second pass would've just dried it out more, made things worse.

We're going to prioritize this fall to get over all those corn stalks rather than if soybean stubble doesn't get the strips made, if it doesn't meet the fertility down. But we can always do that in the spring or no-till it in. And to get 100% of our acres back into cover crops. Last year, we fell a little bit short on some of our sugar beet ground, as I think Bryan Rhybert mentioned that the beet ground was just black all winter long and to get that covered.

Noah Newman:

How long have you been using cover crops for, would you say?

Ryan Shaw:

We've been flirting around with them for quite a few years now. I'd say about 15 years. We're slowly getting into more blends and stuff, we do interseed our corn now. We're starting to flirt with more of them and get more comfortable with which ones that they say you don't want to go to seed and become nauseous and become a problem.

Noah Newman:

Mikayla's got one. Okay, Mikayla Parker, what do you got?

Audience:

So all three of you guys are using cover crops and I've heard strip-tillers say "I can't make cover crops work with strip-till". What are they missing or what do you think they're doing wrong?

Ryan Nell:

In my opinion, I think covers and strip-till are a perfect harmony. I really like having the cover crop in between my 30-inch rows and I prefer not to have a cover crop touching my corner beans. In my opinion, I think they work better together. We run an air seeder and then we run a strip-till bar right behind it so it's two separate passes. In my opinion, it's a great system. It's hard to beat that system.

Noah Newman:

John, if you want to answer too?

John Stevens:

Anything of soil health works anywhere, it's just how can you manage it to get it to your operation. They're just a great companion together. How to incorporate it, we did not change no-till cover crops go into young corn with the broadcast or strip-till go into young corn with the broadcast. I don't fathom or I can't correlate how the strip-till ahead of planting has a reflect on the cover crop application later on. Depending on cover crop species goals, timings, things like that, you can run into some challenges. It works well.

Ryan Nell:

Maybe on that part, maybe if you're spring stripping, I could see that as an issue if you had cereal rye that maybe got a little out of hand and you're trying to spring strip or try to manage that. I could definitely see that you could run into an issue, but that's a management thing and you just have to see what the calendar is in your situation and maybe you need to terminate your cover crop a little earlier rather than trying to strip-till it green. I could see that being an issue. Trying to get a strip-till bar through some pretty massive cover crops could be an issue, depending on your bar, but it's just a management thing and going from there.

John Stevens:

Now that you say that, I'm going to use a strip-till bar to seed cover crops, just to thumb that. Don't work here.

Noah Newman:

Ryan, anything you want to add to the conversation?

Ryan Shaw:

I don't think anybody is doing anything wrong, it's just a matter of adapting to what you're seeing each year because most of it's environmental or weather that can throw the loops into it. We found when we were seeding down solid seeded cover crops that if we were making fall strips and applying the fertilizer that we were ripping two perfect rows out. That's why we use the interseeder to apply all our fall cover crops outside of our zone that'll over winter.

And then if we have a spare tank that we're not using on our SoilWarrior, we'll put some winter kill stuff down like oats or buckwheat or anything to hold that berm down and with hopes to stale seed that into it the next spring. We had ran into trouble with, like they were saying, cereal rye or annual rye that gets seeded over into your planting zone and we one spring suffered from having troubles closing our slot and stuff just because of the mesh of roots that were there.

Audience:

If you were forced, hypothetically, to get rid of either strip-till or cover crops, which would you get rid of?

John Stevens:

Boy, that's a tough one. I'd have a lot of crying nights. They're both just wonderful tools. If I had to get rid of one of them, it would be the strip-till because I know in time I could get the cover crops to do the tillage work that I'm trying to do and in the long term the cover crops will do the fertility and everything else that they're trying to do.

Ryan Nell:

Yeah, my cover crop would've been gone right away if I had to choose one or the other. If you took a fall strip away from me, I'd be very disappointed. Yeah.

Ryan Shaw:

For me, I guess it would all depend on the acreage or the farm that I was dealing with at that time or field by field. If I wasn't applying any nutrients or banding it down, I'd keep the cover crap.

Noah Newman:

All right, next question.

Ryan Nell:

 That was a fun one.

Audience:

A little backdrop on the question first. I talked to Ryan last night at one of the round tables-

Ryan Shaw:

I don't know where.

Audience:

I work for an entity that is involved in trying to build out soil health programming and providing cost share for local... I work for the state. Sorry, my apologies. But my question is how important is that flexibility in using cover crops to move it from field to field or acre to acre?

We have some folks who really want to push for, if you're going to get cost share for cover crops, you need to do it on the same acres year after year, to build to the soil health piece that was mentioned. But think about it from the perspective of when you're starting and I want to hear from producers. How important is that flexibility to move it around even if you're pursuing some sort of funding?

John Stevens:

I think with your government programs, the flexibility of the program would be a big important factor to allow flexibility because we have bad years, good years, things like that. If you sign into it as a permanent contract, you could have the debate that if we're getting into cover cropping and we're moving that cover crop from field to field and never give that same spot the many years of cover crops it might take to heal that dead dirt and create functioning living soil, we might be missing some opportunity.

But at the same time, you'd want that ability for that producer learning to be able to adapt to the first couple years, to be like, "Okay, we tried it on that field, we're not quite understanding what's going on. Let's go to this field" without losing that contract.

Noah Newman:

Ryan or Ryan, anything to add?

Ryan Shaw:

I think there should be some flexibility in it, but I do see the reasoning behind wanting to follow the same track number to "We won't see the change in one year, but if you could do the multiple years in a row, you may start to see something change".

But if it's a newcomer, you don't want to put them in a position where they can't be flexible enough to where they get a bad taste of it and abandon it. Because I think with the programs, you want them to continue that even after the program was over with, so more leaning towards that, what works for their system. If it's rotating to a different field, I think that they should be flexible with that.

Noah Newman:

Next question.

Audience:

Yeah. Different subject, a little bit more around soil sampling. We're strip-tilling now and before we just did a grid sample based on GPS through the field pick points. You guys soil sample? And if so, are you sampling in where you're going to do the strip-tilling and put the fertilizer or just random? I'd be curious to see what you're doing and what success you've had.

Ryan Nell:

We currently don't band with a strip-till bar. We're broadcasting in front of the strip-till bar. We're still doing grid sampling. Most of it's two and a half, I do have some that I'll do at one acre grids. But I think once we went to banding, I think I would maybe change that a little bit and not focus so much on soil sampling.

I know I did ask the question for going to banding and how do you soil sample, and the way the soil sampling center said was don't overthink it. Don't "Oh I need to take five out of here, five out of here". Use more cores, spread out the risk. More is better. Any room for error, you're going to stretch that out further. The guy actually said maybe the best thing to do is the guy soil sampling, don't tell him that you banded and just let averages work out. That's the experience I've had with it.

John Stevens:

It's a great question because I think I'd be thinking along the same lines that if we're banding here and you're randomly soil testing, you're going to once in a while probe a hotspot and then a non-spot kind of deal. We quit soil sampling several years ago, but just for the sake of science, we grid sampled a field back in '11 or '12 and then we've run a very minimalistic P&K program, almost non-existent pounds over them years. And we'll grid sample that one and it did have a few years of strip-till banding and so we're going to grid sample it just to see what's changed over that timeframe.

But that's my concern. And then if we're banding at that six to eight inch and you're only sampling at six, does that change anything or do you have to start the whole farm over at eight inches? I would ask another. On that line, Gruber had a thing where they did some bio-stripping and they took a cover crop and instead of a mechanical strip-till, they did the cover crop in a strip and he just did a soil sample and then between them they did a soil sample and the green strip was much higher in fertility. You had a corn crop there last year with that massive root system, moved a lot of nutrients. Is that going to have more nutrients in that spot because of the corn root?

Audience:

Right. It's almost like we might have to recalibrate ourselves on the soil sampling. I remember George Ream from the University of Minnesota did a ton of work with ridge tillers, he took cores every two inches. And to help them figure out where to take the cores and then how to recalibrate, what does it mean to put on? So yeah, I was curious.

John Stevens:

Yeah.

Ryan Shaw:

My wife's in charge of all of our soil tests and she pulls all the samples and she has the nomad so she goes to the same spot. We grid sampled all of our acres one time to get a portfolio of it. We've since now moved to management zones so it's a little less samples. But with us staying in the same zone every year, she pulls a series from inside and outside of our planning zone to mix together and send in, mostly so that we're getting applications for our lima for the whole profile.

But we were never really guided one way or the other, they just told us to be consistent with whatever we were doing. We try to go back to that same spot and do the stop sign effect from the vehicle and just building that portfolio. We're getting through to where, with the same lab, that we have multiple years or over a six-year time period that we're getting at least data to be able to sort through and see what is changing. Where do we need to move those management zones to and how does it correlate to what we see in the field knowing that that ridge is there along with the combined mapping?

Noah Newman:

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All right, with equipment shortages and supply chain issues, what's your approach to placing orders and how does that differ from your strategy for inputs? Ryan Nell, we'll start with you.

Ryan Nell:

I guess from an input standpoint, we really didn't have too many issues with fertilizer or herbicides. We did have to go to a bigger supplier. Our smaller guy that we were using for some generics, he actually told us he really wasn't going to be able to supply us, so we ended up going to our local co-op, which actually worked out very well.

Equipment-wise, we're actually planning now for next spring. Looking at a new strip-till bar, negotiating currently, just to make sure we have it by next spring. But everything else is kind of you call and you find out, "Oh, we won't have it till this time". It's out of sight, out of mind and move on.

Noah Newman:

John?

John Stevens:

Equipment-wise, the auction lot always has stuff. The neighbor's wheats always have stuff. I'm not worried about equipment-wise. Herbicide, we moved half the farm this year to a organic type setup, not to be certified organic or anything like that, but just because of the herbicide availability and everything. We ended up beating the truck with the planter, so we were planting before the herbicide even showed up and so we just put the small grains in and just did it old school. Hoping we can move forward with that more in the rotation.

And the fertilizer, I guess I'm the guy that looks at my soil and remembers eighth grade science that says your soil's made out of P, K and 26 other minerals. And I'm just going to learn how to create availability out of that way so I don't have to be so dependent upon that purchase of P&K. And crop rotation and cattle can help bring that back.

We did some green fallow 20 years ago. 22 years ago, we did a green fallow, kind of. It was you let the pigweed and everything come up big and we knocked it down. We did it until it heavy and it came back up and knocked it down a couple years and then two years later we did that again because they were bad weather years and we put a lot of manure on.

And to this day, 20 years later, that field soil tests better, produces better and everything. And so if I can take that kind of scenario and bring it to the rest of the farm, maybe when the co-op says that we're a little short on P&K and some nitrogen, you can think "Well, all right. I got options".

Noah Newman:

Ryan Shaw, anything to add that?

Ryan Shaw:

On the equipment side, mostly it's just the expendables. Since COVID hit, you got used to trying to be more prepared for stuff so when we buy a set of blades for the SoilWarrior, we might buy two sets just so we have them at the shop, the oil, the bearings. For the herbicide's ends, we've gotten pretty used to pre-buying it early and then when they get to the delivery at the crop service that we will even go pick it up ourselves just to have it on farm. And instead of returning our overage, we just stock it for the next year. It's just moving that up six more months to being pre-planned.

Audience:

Have you guys ever tried no-till? Right now I'm more no-till than strip-till. Is it worth it? Do you get enough of a yield bump converting everything to strip-till?

John Stevens:

From no-till or from conventional?

Audience:

From no-till.

John Stevens:

I would say analyze what you got going on. For us, our soil does not percolate water very well and so for us, the strip-till is a fantastic transition tool from conventional to no-till. The no-till and conventional till maps were very similar. Every little dip in the field was a very depressed yield or a zero and so I added it up and on one field the loan was 18 acres that we paid rent on, we fertilized, we sprayed and we got zero kernels off of, because it had a little bit of dip.

We timed it perfect with the range to drown that out of young seedlings and where strip-till we can go through there and we've got five or seven years of maps and anecdotal evidence, which is still my evidence that I can take them 18 acres and I can reclaim them. I didn't have to go rent 18 more acres.

The strip-till opened that soil up, lets that water percolate through and the seedling stays high and dry with like we were talking and you guys see it too, that the range, you don't get that half inch, you get four inches in a couple hours now. And so all them little dips, the water's away. And even with the aggressive primary tillage, by the time you do the finished pass and all the passes in the spring, even with primary tillage, them little dips would still suffer late season and strip-till seems to do that.

Direct crop expense, I think when we started strip-tilling, we had farm business management there and on day one was a hundred dollars per acre direct crop expense saving on equipment side and fertilizer application. The U of M had a lot of great reports of banding versus broadcast fertilizer at reduced rates. I didn't have to do that research, I just had to trust them.

And that's why we're doing that soil test after seven and seven or eight year, 10. Oh shit, what year is it now? Okay, that's 11 years. But that's why we're doing that grid sampling now because we've been running such a reduced rate of P&K, to see what really happened to those fields because the yields are still trend lining better. The strip-till has just become a fantastic tool to manage that thousand dollars a ton fertilizer now.

Ryan Nell:

I think for us, I'd probably be opposite than what a lot of people would say, but I would be more willing to no-till corn. We have in the past, if the conditions are there in the spring. If it's soil moisture, it's not so much the strip, just more soil moisture. But beans, we used to no-till beans then we moved to fall strips for beans. I don't think I'd give that up. I would be willing to no-till corn, but to just make a pass with a strip-till bar I think is very beneficial.

Ryan Shaw:

For us with sugar beets in the rotation, with us having to close that lifter wheel slot and take the strip-till machine through there to at least level it back out, we kind of have to on some of those acres. But like I said, with prioritizing getting over the corn stubble acres, we tend to look at it as a system ways that strip-till necessarily isn't the finish line, that some chunks or some fields do have the potential to be no-tilled. And that if we can get away with that, especially now that diesel prices are up, we'll take a serious look at that this fall, that we can get away with it on this field and not take a yield hit. Especially if we don't have to apply the nutrients in it. We set our planter up to be able to carry all the nutrients if we needed to on the planter, so we have that option.

John Stevens:

Are you pretty fertile soiled, since you don't apply nutrients with your strip-till?

Ryan Nell:

We got out of dairy last year, so about half my ground doesn't require much fertilizer. Thank grandpa for that one. Yeah, but majority of our ground, I would say we've maintained pretty well, but a lot of it, the reason we haven't been banding was more logistics and we had a terrible experience the first year.

John Stevens:

Okay.

Ryan Nell:

The whole strip-till bar almost left the entire farm. We got rid of the fertilizer applicator at the time and now we've been doing it enough now we feel comfortable. It's like we're ready to get back into it.

John Stevens:

Okay.

Ryan Nell:

A lot of that was more just logistics, manpower, equipment. Now we feel like we're to that point we could take it on again and be just as efficient.

Noah Newman:

Looking ahead to 2023, are you guys thinking about making any changes or additions to the crop rotation?

John Stevens:

Absolutely. Try and go more green. More green. God, I hate you. Sorry. I'd, I'd really like to see if we couldn't keep trying the living cover on a few acres, more crop rotation and diversity there. And then like we had said with the other things in that I'd really be curious if we couldn't either move to some banding behind the strip-till bar or the planter.

Our grandparents, when times were tough, they weren't spending. They weren't just writing checks to the co-ops like we do. And I've had a few old guys give me quite a few lectures. Like "Yeah, my dad, he had the old herbicide thing on the back of the plant" or like, "Yeah, we didn't herbicide the whole, we just had to protect that plant". And you're like, "Well God dang". I wonder can that kind of stuff work nowadays?

And then with the green manuring behind the small grains, we're a yield-limited environment. That's why I ask if your soil's pretty rich because we would be the opposite. We're low on P, K, organic matter and pH and missing some top soil. But other than that, it's a beautiful place. And so we're very yield-limited on that stuff.

But the fun part of it is that the small grains work really well. We lack some markets for that, but we can make up for some of that stuff because at the thousand dollars a ton fertilizer we can green manure behind it just like grandpa did and not have that expense the following. So you're setting yourself up this fall for success in '23 and you're two, three years out.

Ryan Nell:

I think with crop rotation we did make some changes this spring. We actually added some more corn-on-corn to the system, since we stripped for both we just made a freshener pass for the corn-on-corn. Even with the extra cost of nitrogen, we still thought... And when we could sell corn for that price as well. But I think for '23, compared to our last couple years, maybe our corn-on-corn will be a little higher. The wheat acres stay about the same. Those only go on certain pieces of ground. But from a rotation wise, nothing's going to change too much there.

Ryan Shaw:

For a rotation for us, we want to get a few more acres of some small grains. We do grow a hundred acres of cereal rye to keep for our own seed, but to get a few more acres of that because the best way to get the neighbors to start using cover crops is to give them some seed so we're going to do that. We're in a pretty diverse area, they grow pickles and potatoes and stuff, but we'd like to get into some edible beans or possibly some non-GMO beans just to spread ourselves out a little bit. And I think it was mentioned at one of the other or maybe Brian's that the sugar beets, we'd like to extend that rotation out to get to that four or five years in between the sugar beets being grown on each chunk.

Noah Newman:

What about technology? Eyeing any new technology for the upcoming year? Any additions?

Ryan Nell:

Can you get it? We did order some new 4640 screens and 6,000 globes that finally came in. We went to passive implement guidance on both of our strip-till bars and planters. Other than that, nothing really from a technology standpoint that we are going to do differently.

John Stevens:

I'm on the ag leader side, and I'm content with what I have. We're good to go. Yeah.

Ryan Shaw:

Sometimes I think, to be completely honest, we may have too much of the technology-end on our farm. But we have an immense amount of data that we aren't using the technology that we have already to its full potential in my mind. We're quite a few years behind sorting through all that data. But before we add anything else to it, I think we're going to spend some time over the winters and really dive into that and see where we can use that to maximum potential.

Noah Newman:

Got a few minutes left if anyone has any questions in the- Oh, we got one over here. All right, go for it.

Audience:

Yeah. John, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about your green manuring practice and what sort of N-rates you're using after the green manure?

John Stevens:

Historically in our area, the alfalfa was the nitrogen that we used and so I'm just trying to bring that back. But we know in our area that we're usually planting on soil that's just coming out of frost or you still have frost below so I'm a big advocate or I'm addicted to the inferral product. And then I think to wean myself off or to step into this gracefully, I would probably still run a tiny bit of maybe 10, 20% of our end program.

I would still probably side-dress very early because I don't know, is it going to be a hot year, a late spring, a cold year? How fast is that crop going to break down for us when we're not mullboarding it anymore? Does that matter? I don't know. And I think that's where the management with John Kempf and just some of these other companies coming in to just baby step our way, if that makes sense.

Ryan Nell:

I guess we don't really do a lot of what I call green manure. We do have manure but nowhere near enough and I use that more from a P & K building standpoint on certain fields. From a nitrogen standpoint, the last two years we've been right at a 0.7 applied and that's what I try to use. Actually been very happy with the yields at that 0.7 but we're actually looking at increasing. We're thinking we're actually limiting ourselves a little bit at that 0.7, whether that being we need to band a little bit more, do a little better job that way or increase the rates a little bit and hopefully see the overall average go up.

Audience:

How do you handle your pH with no-till and strip-till? Do you try to use a pelleted product or do you do a full with tillage to try to bring your pH down and then go back to your program or what's your scenario?

Ryan Nell:

We just VRT rate 80-89 lime, leave it on top of the ground and strip through it. Been doing that for quite a few years and I don't have a way of banding anything, [inaudible 00:32:24] or anything that way, but that's what we've been doing, it seems to be working. I'm not going to take a disc or a chisel plow to try to incorporate it deeper. We've just been broadcasting before we strip.

Ryan Shaw:

Oh, we're pretty fortunate with the sugar beet company. We've got plenty of lime for really close. When we do need it, it's variable rated and we just broadcast it over the top, preferably before we make the strip so they're not driving on them. But we don't worry either about incorporating it in.

John Stevens:

Yeah, we get a product, there's a wood ash plant or something up by Carlton, Minnesota. It's a byproduct until they blend it with lime and so for us it's a very economical source. Our soil naturally sit around a five-five and so to do it a ton every year, you do a once every three years kind of deal.

Audience:

This question's around soybeans. Are you guys able to do 15-inch soybeans? That's the first question. And the second is, you're saying you weren't going back once you went to strip-till on soybeans. What was the benefit that you saw? I mean you get more pods, more leaves. What's the driving force there?

John Stevens:

March.

Ryan Nell:

Strip-till allowed for earlier planting date. In my opinion, and I might offend somebody, but row spacing doesn't matter, depending on your planting date. If we're early enough in the year, if you're talking April, doesn't matter. I don't know if I would get wider than 30, but strip-till for us has allowed to increase our average planting date forward, probably about two weeks. There is a separate planter in there, fall strips.

For us, it was kind of a game changer just to be able to move that planting date from where we used to be to where we are now. And just seeing shorter plants, tighter nodes, more beans, longer maturities, higher yields, easier harvest. The benefits just kept going on and on. But we will do fifteens if it gets late enough in the year. I like to use May 20th. If we get beyond May 20th, I'll get the air seeder out. Get the beans in as early as possible, and the 30-inch strip-till is what allows that for me.

Ryan Shaw:

I agree. Planting early is the best way for us. We're twin row centered on thirties, so it leaves us a 22-inch gap. It helped us close the rows a little bit sooner for those late emerging wheats and stuff. But typically a lot of our beans follow our sugar beet ground, so it's either bare or black or got the interseeded cover crop in it. A lot of times that's fit before the cornstalks that are going into beans. So we're able to do that beet dirt first and then a lot of times we'll go planting corn for a while and let those corn stalks air out, but we'll bump the population up and then we through the corn stalks.

John Stevens:

Soy beans, they'd drive a man nuts. When we first started transitioning to strip-till, we did no-till, strip-till and had some full tillage and then with no fertility and then brought in fertility things and then took one strip-till plot just because I was going to beat Kip Kohlers and we got 35 bushel ground, we're there. And I put the corn program in with it.

And at the end of the year, I've learned enough of them trials that soybeans, we go for dollars in, dollars out. It's not yield-based because cash flow wise, after hundreds of them trials over several years, the no-till or strip-till beans with no fertility and nothing on it, out cash load. But the one I found intriguing was the corn program under that soybean, it actually made like 63 bushels and we were just like, "Oh!"

We didn't get a killing frost until late October and that's how the other half of the world lives sometimes. But had the season been shorter, that one I think would've been a massive yield increase because in early August that plant was many pods ahead and very far ahead on vegetative growth. And if we would've had a normal September, early September killing frost, the other plants might not have got that late season. So after the beans canopy, if we ever get a late season like that, they'll actually shoot some growth above the canopy and give like a second kick in and that's where we jump from 35 to 50 bushels but September 11th frost usually nips that off and stops it.

There was some potential there, but we tried AMS things and the first time we tried an AMS thing on soybeans, it was a 10 bushel response and you're like, "I've got this figured out. I'm the greatest soybean guy in the county" and the next four years trying to duplicate that, I couldn't get a single response and you're just like, "I am frustrated".

Yeah, soybeans. I think the big thing with the strip-till and soil health... I believe there's a lot of university guys out there who'll say soybeans respond to fertility, not fertilizer. And so I think with the soil health, we roll an old sod over nine on your P1, 30, 40 on your K. We get a lot of that kind of soil test and you roll that over with a mullboard and you'll get phenomenal beans because that thing's had 20 years of mineralization that might not show up on paperwork and maybe that that's a local. I'm just saying that for us, that's the kind of responses we get.

Noah Newman:

I believe we have time for one more. Right over here.

Audience:

Yeah, we have about 24 hour beef cows. I'm just curious, if maybe you guys have any livestock or not, but how do you get your manure? What type of equipment would you use to haul it out or when would you haul it out or how does that all work without wrecking your burns? Because we strip-till in the fall, so yeah, how do you handle the manure if you guys have livestock at all?

John Stevens:

You had the balls.

Ryan Nell:

We don't own a chisel plow yet. What we'll do when the grounds froze, I'll make fall strips and then we'll stockpile everything until the grounds froze then haul on that, which some people can't haul on frozen ground. We're small enough, we're able to. And then come springtime when it thaws out, I will dedicate a small chunk of a field or a small field that's going to get beat up until about June 1st, that will see tillage.

But then where we did haul manure, we'll freshen that. Just go by, push it away a little bit and then plant into that. That's been working really well for us. It's not liquid. We're using a bedding pack. When we did have liquid, this is a whole different conversation. We did a lot more tillage. Now that the dairy's gone and we don't have the dairy liquid manure, it's a lot easier to strip-till. I don't have a great answer with manure and strip-till. I know there's guys doing it, but you start talking tankers, compaction, wet soils, wet springs. It can be very difficult, in my opinion. We had a tanker and then we also had a night side slinger spreader for bedding pack.

John Stevens:

We rent a vertical beater for pack and I guess that's where with the cattle, the soil health and the all the other stuff just comes together so well. That's what really helped us launch forward is because you can't fail if you have cattle because anything becomes feed. But we did have great luck with the pen pack manure. We were always told you can't not or you must incorporate the manure and we haven't done that for quite a while. The vertical beaters just work good.

Throughout the summer, the rain's melted into the soil, then your strip-till machine, if you beat the strip-till machine or with a crop rotation, you got some hay grounds, maybe you can do it there. Because yeah, with the equipment, the manure's better, all your beat equipment. It changed the name, but the potentials are the same for field damage and traffic and stuff. And with the cattle, pick and choose your battles and stuff. But yeah, I don't worry about it. Okay, let's just back that up and erase the last five minutes. Non-issue. Just go spread it. Just watch your soil.

Ryan Shaw:

We're working with a local dairy this year for the first time. We're going to give them some silage in exchange for some manure. We're going to find out how much compaction they do make and how to mitigate it. For the tillage part of it, the ground's all interseeded with a cover crop so we'll be able to liquid manure it on, probably about 5,000 gallon, stay in compliance with applying it to a green growing crop and watch it, see when would be the best time to go through it without all the residue there.

We might possibly just leave it through the winter and then make the strip-till pass in the spring in it. See if we can control the traffic of the manure tankers to come in one driveway, go across the field, go out the other driveway without turning around in the centers. If they don't make it all the way across, don't go back for it, just start and go until you run out. Just to keep any of the cross traffic and driving on the berms and keep the compaction on our 30-foot tram lines. Let them spread the 30 feet. Try and contain their compaction where ours is.

John Stevens:

Some of the University of Minnesota guys are up giving a presentation and you start to learn which ones like tillage and chemicals and so you have fun with them. And we got them to admit that in our highly erodible soil, again, a local scenario, if I was to spread that manure and then go out with a disc, a vertical till, a digger, do a shallow incorporation... If it was in the fall, let's say, behind a season, by the time the next spring comes around, we would have enough wash off our land.

I think you would lose more than you would've gained by trying to save that manure. Whereas if I can throw it on top of that ground, the covers and everything else are holding that water back, reducing the runoff and getting that nutrient into the ground. Just a food for thought of where you're at and then you got, like you had said, local regulations.

Noah Newman:

And that'll wrap things up. Thanks to John Stevens, Ryan Nell, and Ryan Shaw joining us at the conference. If you're interested in this summer's national strip-tillage conference, head to our website, striptillfarmer.com. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks to our sponsor, Yetter Farm Equipment. I'm Noah Newman. Have a great day.