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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Montag Mfg., a trio of experienced strip-tillers talk with a first-time strip-tiller who’s making the switch after years of conventional tillage.

During the National Strip-Tillage Conference, four farmers joined Strip-Till Farmer managing editor Michaela Paukner for dinner.

Nate LeVan, Patrick Stansbery and Kendel Koehn currently strip-till, while Luke Deters and his family are conventional tillage, but Luke wants to try strip-till. 

Over dinner, the three experienced strip-tillers talked Luke through the equipment needs, obstacles and other considerations that come with switching to strip-till.

Listen to part 1 here.

The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Montag Manufacturing.

Montag Manufacturing has rolled out two new industry-first products.  Cover Crop Plus is the first metering system dedicated to cover crop seeds, able to accurately meter even the smallest seeds like cover cress. It can be mounted to tillage implements, combines and self-propelled high clearance machines.  

The second new product is the mammoth sized model 2224 with 13 or 16 tons capacity for producers running with larger strip-till implements. For more information, visit the Montag website or your Montag dealer.

Past Podcasts

Full Transcript

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast brought to you by Montag Manufacturing. Noah Newman here, technology editor for Strip-Till Farmer. And in today's episode of the podcast, we bring you part two of a conversation between three experienced strip-tillers and one farmer considering making the switch to strip-till. Nate LeVan, Pat Stansberry, Kendall Kain, and Luke Dieters join Michaela Paukner, managing editor, for dinner at the 2022 National Strip-Tillage Conference to talk about what to consider when switching to strip-till and more. Let's pick the conversation back up starting once again with everyone's introductions.

My name's Nate LeVan. I have been strip-tilling since 2016. So let's see, seven years. I have the fortune of getting to see a lot of acres because I work for the seed industry too. So I get to see a lot of guys that have tried a lot of different things, ask a lot of questions, so that's a nice part of it. I'm in the North Central Iowa up by Stacyville, Iowa. I farm with my brothers. We still do some conventional till, still some no-till, a little bit of everything. We've tried cover crops. We've tried corn-on-corn. We use Dawn Pluribus strip-tiller and apply a suspension fertilizer.

I'm Pat Stansberry from Sheldon, North Dakota. It's an hour southwest of Fargo. I farm the beaches of Lake Agassiz. Come up the hill and that's where we're at. It's sandy ground, there is some heavier ground, by and large, it's flat. I started strip-tilling in 2015. I run a Case 5310 strip-tiller with Case Air Cart as well. I farm about 1800 acres of... Depends on how high the water is on any given year. That's one thing we do fight, is high water.

We run corn and soybeans. And for the first time since 2011, I planted wheat this year. So going to see how that goes. Hopefully, get a cover crop on that after we get that off. Probably going to be around Labor Day weekend the way it's looking, maybe last week in August. We want to get more into the cover crop side of things, have tried different versions with flying it on and blowing it on with different ways but there's so many ways to do it.

He was asking about does incorporation of a sure start which is 415-

Yep. Yep. Yep.

I mean, you maybe have to choose different ones that are more water-soluble. Some products are a little less sensitive to rain. Some products have a little bit more residual. I mean, depending when you apply it. I really liked Zidua with my burndown because it doesn't have the clay and oils and some of the duals, or those types of high volume products. It seems like you get less antagonism maybe with something like a Zidua. But other than that, my posts are the same.

I like Authority products for... Authority. Yeah. I don't really like skimping on fert or chemical because-

Yeah. Never control about dead weeds.

Yes. That's all I want. I want my fertilizer there or my fertility there for the year.

No weeds.

And no weeds. I'll figure out a way to make it cheaper if I have to, to make it pencil at the price. Because if you've got weeds, it's a train wreck at the end. If you don't have the fert out there, it's a train wreck at the end. I mean, those are the two things that I have control over. I don't have control over the rain. Two things it's like, "All right. It sucks but okay. Go pick that stuff up to co-op and put it out there," but I...

I was just curious. How are you killing your rye? What are you using? Roundup-

Roundup.

Sharpen? Are you putting any sharpen in? I just put a small-

We tried to get SeQuence this year because glyphosate was tight. I thought, "Oh, got my jewel in there."

Yeah. We had Helix. We ended up with Helix instead of glyphosate.

I do. I think straight Roundup is my best one.

Just straight Roundup?

Most times-

Yeah. Roundup three issues.

If I put anything residual, it's Zidua as a little bit of a pre. But if I get that stuff, that gnarly stuff that you're going into, I'm going to wait and mat that down and then-

Well, I rolled it with the roller and then I sprayed it. And then I'm like, "Okay. I just put Roundup under." I'm like, "Why put a lay by?" Because it's just going to sit there.

It's not going to get in the soil.

It's not going to get in the soil. It's like, "Well, okay. We'll just..." And then I think it was... That was basically an afterthought. It was a plant green thing. I'm like, "We'll go try it." I didn't put any fertilizer down. It was wet. Well, it was a cover crop. The whole quarter was a cover crop the year before because it was wet. And so, it's like, "Well, we'll go try it," and no fertilizer. I sprayed it once with Roundup, a pretty hefty dose, but that was it for the whole year.

Nothing post so far.

Nothing... Well, after I planted the beans, I hit it with Roundup after I rolled it. But then after that, I think I had to ring it.

That's not bad.

And other than that, it was...

That's pretty-

Then I was stupid in that combine. Dad rolled this way, I combined this way, and yeah, the slip quits wasn't exactly my friend at that point. So then, we had to be a little bit more careful about where we-

[inaudible 00:05:12] buddy, what are you talking... Just go.

No, it got up and it just went whoop then we're done. Okay. Well, all right. Well, Plan B. But that was the only trouble I had with it and there were 35 bushel beads of... I didn't have a lot into it. It was just kind of a, "Well, we'll see what happens."

Yeah. That's one of those, it wasn't a mistake or it wasn't a really good option that you did.

Well, I don't know. When I was going out there and you're driving along, the only thing holding you up is the rye because you'd be... There's one spot there, the rye drowned out when I was turning and all of a sudden the planter was up and then it wasn't anymore and so we just...

That has been one thing that I've gotten comments on is harvest. Once you start doing less tillage, you'll float bigger parts of combines. And you won't even worry about it. You'll go through those parts that you're like, "Hmm. We've always put tracks here," And you'll be like, "Oh, pull it right on-"

Go all the way to the top.

When you're spraying, well, you might not have to deal with it but I have to deal with water. It's your fight or flight thing. You're hauling the mail, you know you're on a track-

And you know-

And there's a foot of water in front of you and you're like, "Well, here we go." You just go. It's scary to begin with. No, you don't put... When you turn the wheel, that's when you're SOL. Because as soon as you turn the wheel it's like, "Well, we're done." But if you hold her straight and just let her by-

Stay on that same track.

Stay on that same track. Is it the best? No. But what do you do in some of those situations? I mean, you planted through it and you know strip over here. As soon as you turn to right, there's nothing for eight inches. But when you're on that planter track, the tractor or the strip-tiller, it's just-

Yeah. You get into a strip it's going to be, "Oh, bottom of the strip right now."

Yep. You find it real quick.

The only thing about taking our sprinkler track closer and closing some of our sprayer tracks up.

Ah.

I'll just move over 15 inches. So it just kind of-

We're out-

It takes-

Same thing?

Yeah. Our planter, it's all 40 foot and our sprayer 120 [inaudible 00:07:11].

I might run out there with a Salford vertical tillage of sorts and just... If I got some really nasty ones, go and rough them up a little bit. And then, when I was still strip-tilling beans, I'd just move over 15 inches from the previous year's corn row stripped down the middle. I'd pin my whippers up sometimes to do in the corn stalks or I'd hit it with a vertical tillage. And then, I could strip-till the beans of the corn and not have any problem. Otherwise, it turns into a dump break real quick. And you could definitely tell when you hit the bottom of the sprayer ruts but you go back there with a tile spade and dig where your strip is, and you got through the compaction layer most times if you leave it at eight inches. But now with-

Well, the compaction layer is just going to be as deep as you made the strip so.

Yeah. But now with the Air Drill, it might be a little different. I might have to change things because no-tilling the beans in... Yeah. I'll just plant at an angle. That'll be fine. But I just-

That's what we do with our grains. Typically, we're going on an angle.

But I just put that compaction in that area. I know it's going to affect yield but... That's the hard part is trying to figure out what... Every spring you show up, "Okay. How wet is it? Well, okay. All right. We can go do this. Okay. Let's go."

You got to pick your problem right [inaudible 00:08:25].

I know. I know.

So it's been a while but do you still worry about a burndown or what are your big problem leads, I guess?

I was telling the guy today we've been struggling a little bit with [inaudible 00:08:39]. We're actually spraying some with the Liberty that are already coming back. And I think, I mean talking to him, we put an RO system in a year ago, in an RO, and I got my samples here, but our pH in that is 5.28, otherwise it's at 7.8.

I was going to say usually you want a little acid in glyphosate anyways, don't you?

Yeah, but he thinks, I was talking to him here, he thinks that we're probably getting our pH too low by adding AMS to that yet with the Liberty.

So it's like a 4.5 or a 4, yeah...

Yeah. And he thinks that we're burning it too hard and it's not actually killing, it's not getting down to the plants.

Now I feel real stupid because what's RO?

It's a reverse osmosis.

My next question is maybe going to sound even worse. See, all I do is I take a two-inch trash pump down to a slew and I pump water in the water truck.

Well, you don't got problems with it.

Okay, because you guys are talking about doing water stuff and I'm like... And then I put the AMS in and I get really good control with Liberty and Enlist. Is that a soft water thing? Is it...

Yeah.

Okay.

Because I'm at 303 hardness. That's what the hardness is.

He has a lot of stuff that's going to chelate the glyphosate and it's going to take it out of suspension.

My chlorides are 60, my pH is 7.28, so I'm just loaded. My sodium...

This is a problem I never had to worry about before.

You don't probably with your... And so here is my RO water, my hardness is down to 16, so that takes...

It's going to lather up real nice.

Yeah. And my pH is 5.58 and my chloride is 2.5 from 16. So it just changes. So we've done quite a bit of testing with rye and glyphosate on our burndown and our cover crop. So we normally do 32 ounces and we took it the first year we went 32, 28, and 24. You couldn't see any difference.

On just straight rye?

Yeah, it just killed it all. So this year we did from 32 down to six, and just had strips. And 22, it was still golden.

No kidding.

But from there on it started to get... We went right back over it because we didn't-

You don't want the train wreck I had.

Yeah. So we're down to spraying 24 on everything on our ride [inaudible 00:11:13].

That's for burndown on... Well granted it wasn't rye, but just... Well this year I was, yeah, 22 ounces of Roundup was basically where I... That's even in the corn burndown with the corn chemicals.

So I think your water is [inaudible 00:11:32] too.

But yeah. And then the Liberty, it's three pounds of AMS spray, or so. Sprayable AMS. I do 32 ounces of... Because my thing is mare's tail. I hate that damn thing. That was the biggest thing everybody asked, "Well what was your biggest weed you had to worry about when you chased?" Mare's tail, that grows everywhere.

It grows in the fall...

And I don't have the time to fly around with the sprayer in the fall. I know I should.

And they tell you like 240 [inaudible 00:11:57] of dicamba in the fall is like a perfect way to get ahead of it.

I know.

Who has the time?

And the co-op has all their guys in the deep banders-

They've been winterized already.

Yeah.

Unless they're spraying armyworms like they were last year, all sprayers are-

I didn't have that problem... Well, maybe, but they have to swim to live in our neck of the woods. But yeah, I hate that weed. But I was out last week and had some pig weed that... Oh, what else? Lamb's quarters, a couple other things that escapes this tall. It's like it's 90 degrees high humidity, Liberty, Enlist, next day scorched dirt. If that stuff could have corkscrewed into the ground, it would've, but I'm like, yes, now I feel happy. Die weed, die. That's all I was....

It's a $19,500 tote of... That's what it is.

I know. I'll get the bill. I think it's actually at my house.

To the penny.

I don't even use Vaseline either, so that's the worst part. So yeah, I don't like it. But like I said, I've heard of guys having issues with using the generics. I know some guys do and everything works out, but then what happens when it doesn't? And yes, a lot of companies will come by and they'll make it right, but at the same point, I don't want to do it twice. I don't have the damn time. So I like the Liberty and I like the Enlist one. They mesh well together as long as you got your anti-foamer. And I mean, yeah, if you really want to get really, really nasty on some weeds, I did some PP ground, I threw in Roundup with the Liberty and Enlist. It wasn't very much, but I was rinsing out and going to a different one. But that was scorched earth too. That was great. There wasn't anything alive when it was done. So water, hemp, and everything just down.

Probably the next best thing is who's your dealer support because you're going to want dealer support. So for me, there's no dealer support. I got mine from Carson. Carson was great. Carson Holsterman.

Yeah, he's my neighbor.

I bought the furbished units through him. They showed up on a truck here. He helped me as best they could, but I get just as much support from Carson as I do Joe Bassett, which Joe is great. I mean that's a small line company. I could have gone down the street and talked about a gladiator. I mean there's not really a lot of deer strip-tills around. I mean ETS is great.

I love the warrior. I like the whole premise, the whole setup, everything about it. But when you're first getting into it, you don't know what the heck you're going to have at the end of that. And when I got into it five years ago, they didn't have deals with dealerships or seven years ago. Technically now they didn't have...

It was just kind of the main area.

Yeah. I mean, Kevin showed up and the guy that I worked for, he put it together and if you know Kevin at all, Kevin... I like Kevin, he just shows up and bolts stuff together and tells you how to run it, and then he wanders off and gets the next one. And he can tell you forwards and backwards in his sleep about the thing. But mine was, it came down to what I could spend on it as... And dad was full with tillage and basically I bought a strip-tiller, drove to South Dakota and got it, almost Nebraska, but picked it up, brought it home and he says, "What's that?" "It's a strip-tiller." "Oh, I got to go get the air cart in Canada now." So we went to Canada and got the air cart. "What the are we going to do with this?" "Well, we're going to mesh this to that."

There's going to be some tubes.

There's tubes, there's going to be all steer and we got to make sure the versatile, the old 150 has enough hydraulic horsepower. He wasn't for it and I just kind of did it because I took over his tractor. I paid for it.

It's yours.

Yeah. Well, I actually wouldn't lease another 450 versatile. Well, this is my baby. It was sketchy for a year or two, but it took him, I think maybe a year or two after he said it. He is like, "Okay." And now it's...

Standard.

It's standard. I mean we were chisel plow one fall, and the next fall I'm flying around with a strip-tiller and that's all we do and we have a disc for PP ground, but I really hate using the darn thing, so that's why I got the no-till drill. The less I can do, especially with fuel at five bucks, the less time...

Your drill is basically vertical till anyway.

Yeah. It pretty much is.

Yeah.

500 pounds. It's got the constant downforce on it, so it's always pushing. You set it 5, 6, 700 pounds at about a thousand, you lift the whole drill off the ground, but... and you just go.

Which drill are you on?

I got a PD500 case, a precision disc 500.

Okay.

Yeah, that was...

So at the end of the day you should do it. I mean rip the bandaid. Just do it.

And let's burn a time-out. We have a special message from our sponsor, Montag Manufacturing. Montag Manufacturing has rolled out two new industry first products. Cover Crop Plus is the first metering system dedicated to cover crop seeds able to accurately meter even the smallest seeds like CoverCress. It can be mounted to tillage implements, combines, and self-propelled high clearance machines. Now the second new product is a mammoth size model 2224 with 13 or 16 tons capacity for producers running with larger strip-till implements. For more information, visit the Montag website or your Montag dealer. Now let's get back to the conversation.

Do you have anybody that's local that could do some custom stuff or even try it?

No, nobody does it around us. It's no-till or conventional. My caution with the no-till was how do you get the fertilizer in the ground? I mean to keep it volatilizing or just washing away. That's my problem.

Unless his option, go with the planter.

That makes complete sense. But then you got the compaction like I was wondering, can you do it alternate methods besides, can you do it with cover crops?

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know if we're going to continue with the cover crop thing, which we are, we're going to be fertilizing in that cover crop. Like we'll dry spread in that cover crop and help get that to help cycle.

There's been a lot of Gandy boxes on cover crop on verticals. I mean that's kind of like a drill. They all kind of basically do similar things. Yeah, so you do it that way.

Going back to flexibility. Well now they're getting more expensive because everybody else wants to make a cover crop thing. You can go buy a Gandy box, 24 hold Gandy box for little or nothing and now it's... But yeah, your cover crop, you can put a little [inaudible 00:18:56].

That's actually what a colleague that was, he does seed corn, so they bought a mock [inaudible 00:19:02], I think he has a John Deere, I can't remember the model, but they just found an old Gandy cart, mounted it on the high speed disc and he has the biggest, fullest cover crops that you'll ever see in the fall.

Gets it in there, gets it on moisture...

And I think he puts, I'm pretty sure he puts his dry fertilizer on before he does that, but a lot of ways to skin that cat.

Yep.

 My old neighbor, he built an inter seater with a, I think he just, old air drill row units, bolted them on a frame. Same thing. It's just a ground drive Gandy box. Fly them down, run as fast as he can go. He had to put his cover crop down. It's not, it's in a row, but yeah...

Yeah, it's in a... Yeah.

But I always was wondering with the Haggis guys put those on, but then they don't get incorporated with some guys that have the side dress bar for Haggi.

Yeah, that's right, yeah.

But you can blow it down through that, but you don't necessarily incorporate it. What about those old Lilliston cultivators?

Oh, like a cultipacker?

Well, it's just a bunch of S times, I mean, it's a [inaudible 00:20:05].

I'm thinking like a rotary head. Put four of those things-

Yeah, just let wander along. I mean that'd be another way to incorporate it at a decent speed if you could.

That's the other kicker, Haggis are...

At the torque. But other than that...

Well if he just drug it behind him... I mean you're not really going to do a whole lot, it's just there. I don't know. It might be a train wreck and it might work, but isn't pretty much all we do is trial and error and take it off, and...

The cool part about this is the more of these you go, if you ask people, I'll be honest with you, that's a good part about the conferences is they're there to all want to get you better.

Sure. Yeah. Well that's why I came because it is an open mind just to ask and see.

The round tables are usually pretty good.

Yeah. See I was thinking of them on the way home. It's like, "Son of a... I had the right guy here and I couldn't..."

I want to try it slowly because you can make a lot of mistakes in a hurry if you do it on everything. You know what I mean? Square-

Go over there and talk to the guys at JNS and say, "Who out here runs a gladiator?"

That's exactly what I'd do.

Look at a Gladiator?

Well, I mean they're interesting. I mean that's what I would-

I have a Gladiator.

You do?

Yeah.

Okay. I like the shank type, but if I had to incorporate it with a planter, it would have to be like a culture like the Pluribus or something.

It can be whatever you want it to be. Those-

My thing is about trying to set it up on the plant with the planter, doing its tripping.

One tripper.

Oh, like what's the rigs of the-

One tripper.

Yeah, one tripper.

One trippers or...

You could do that in your swamp?

Not with a shank, probably.

That would be the kicker, that would... You're dragging a shank and you're heavier ground in the spring. Nah.

I don't know. I like doing it ahead because then you got that smith that's black.

Well yeah, I would think that would be ideal. The contour is going to be hard to keep it on the... Because we're on hillsides and curves. So it's like...

You got to put a screw in on your planter.

You'd have to, yeah. Is that possible? Does that keeping it on there?

I know those guys do it.

Yeah, there's a bunch of guys that talked about it. The first conference I came down to here, there was a guy, he's like,

I steer.

Auto steer. Again, all it takes is money.

Just keep throwing money at them, and hope it goes away, right?

I'll do some...

If you're willing to do a little wrenching on something like that, get yourself used equipment and buy the nice guidance, but buy the used-

Well I do welding machine shop as a side. That's what I do.

He's no problem-

It's like finding the time to do that.

You need to find yourself some red balls. That's what you need to do. You could beef those suckers up and maybe it'd be nice.

Trying to find any more of those-

Hey, Nelson has 16 of them. I got a guy.

Who does?

That would match up with the planter, but...

Down there, he's one of the guys that kind of does strip-till and he has custom work and he had three rigs going there, two 16s and one 12. And he just does a lot of custom work. He's converting one of them to a 16 row, or I think they're a 16 rowed Pluribus. Just has some flexibility. But those guys had a bunch of units that they were put together.

Interesting.

This guy that was in South Dakota, that was... I bought this hitch for my air cart because the guy by [inaudible 00:23:21], I think it is, he's the one that built the strip kit for me. And so I was getting the hitch from the guy down there and he runs two or three 24 row case ones, and then he runs the lynx cart behind it. Yeah, he does custom stuff. It's like how fast do you go? I mean he's just hauling the mail-

Hauling the seed.

It's like, wow. And those things will put down a thousand pounds at five mile an hour of fertilizer. It's like, oh. Then you go and look at the Lynx units and everything's hydraulic trip. That would be nice. Especially if you got rocks.

Zimmerman, they build a script. They use a Lynx cart box.

Interesting.

17 tons.

Yeah.

It's pretty cool the way they built that.

I'm just imagining 17 ton on your contours in the wet spring.

I know.

I think of that in our Kinze cart on the side hill...

Yeah, the kitty cat would be going down the hill sideways, backwards [inaudible 00:24:17] go somewhere.

Oh, man. Especially if there's little frost on the ground.

Well that's the next thing is with the contours, would it be better almost to have a mounted tank or would you want to pull a tank? That's the next kicker.

Yeah. Get some of those inboard tanks. 400 gallons.

Well, these are old-

That's how we run.

These are old-

Is that what [inaudible 00:24:36]?

[inaudible 00:24:36].

We got the side quest thing.

On the big bearing?

Yeah, I've seen that. That's is... Anhydrous tanks, so the side-

I was wondering how you put 40 gallons down there. I was thinking, did you pull a quad cart or...

We used to only have 600 gallon tanks on our property.

Oh my god.

We filled them [inaudible 00:25:06] every two rounds.

So that's why I like that air cut air. I had it, it was 10 ton go.

Yeah?

On beans you can do darn near a quarter, strip-tilling for beans.

That's what we're doing now.

Yeah, those are nice. I've seen the green version of those. Turn that sucker into a sprayer, side dresser. It's a lot of volume.

All we do is plant and strip-till it. That's it. That's what that tractor does.

That's why I keep telling him he's got enough welding skills where...

If you've built that, you can get a seven by seven barn and put any row unit you want.

Like I say, half welder will travel...

Try something. We're always trying something. So all old equipment and just keep it going. But...

Well the thing is it doesn't have to take money to... If you want to try and pound through 10,000 acres of corn, non-corn, or strip-till, or whatever-

Once you prove something, then go get something.

And I'm not trying to say that that isn't right either. Anybody that listens to this podcast, you'd go, "Those idiots." So I mean that's what every day is, it's like... It's going to be different for everybody, for him-

It's all experiments.

10,000 people, 10,000-

I'm pretty sure back when there wasn't any strip-till bars, they did exactly that. Just figured out this works and this doesn't work. One of the seed customers I had, which is great, I get to talk to a lot of different people, but he took a blue jet and basically he doesn't look like a blue jet anymore. I mean he had different row cleaners and he has five different shanks for what he wants to do with it, spraying ball. He had big B33s with wide knives, and then he had this really thin line. I mean, talk about being flexible. I mean his bar was... For an [inaudible 00:26:36] bar, he was flexible to do anything he wants. And it was just a little bit of elbow grease and a welder. And he...

Well, like you say, if the fall goes to heck and you can't get it done, you freeze. You're too wet, too dry. You got to have to figure... I guess you got a couple months during the winter to figure out what your plan B is going to be.

Fret about it and worry about it.

And then I guess when I didn't get mine done in the fall, I go out and in the spring and I kind of, "Well, what am I going to do if this doesn't work?" And it's like, "Well, I go talk to so-and-so see if I can mount a culter kit on the shank." And I go out there and in the sand I get out, "All right, well I guess this is going to work. We're going to go." And it was fine. I spent all winter worrying about nothing.

We sold our blue jet and found big iron here, and I couldn't believe the guy that bought it. I mean what he paid for it. I told him, I said, "You can't even get trash records anymore." They're made out of a spring steel. And I had welded a couple, but welded and fixed a couple of them. I said, "They're not [inaudible 00:27:39]." And that thing sold for $8,500. It's just eight row. [inaudible 00:27:45] I thought if it brought three grand maybe, but-

He had a use for it.

No, he was going to use it as is. He was not going to go pull that thing in the strip-till. I guess it was his first thing.

Sure. Give it a try.

Yeah. Had a shank and he baskets-

Literally a couple of years ago after we were talking, I didn't know you did strip-tilling. Then we were talking and it's like, "Oh, we're looking at a few." And it's like, "Oh, they're an [inaudible 00:28:14]." Maybe less than 20,000 for a 12 row that's decent. And now I've seriously started looking this spring and it's doubled in value for the same thing. It's like wildfire all of a sudden it's like, well that's not an option anymore. So it's like you got to...

Yeah, but hey, go up and have fun. I don't know. I bought a case because it was what I could... And it works.

Do you have trash flippers on yours? A lot of them don't have them but yours does. You know the sunco?

Yep. And I've seen 'em rigged up with yetters or the floating martins and stuff like...

[inaudible 00:28:54] them. Yeah. There's days I want to rip them off, cut them off, throw them in the scrap iron, and then there's days It's like, "Son of a gun, that looks nice." And I don't know what's right or wrong and it's getting to the point where it's like maybe I should revamp and... Because I wonder if I can mount an air up and down one.

I bet you could.

That's what I'm trying to figure out because that would be nicer, I think, in my...

It's one of my favorite parts about that Pluribus unit is the ability to micro adjust the air cleaners. I don't have that on my planter, but on a strip-till bar. That's nice.

So I got the floating ones, but they're not air. He kind of set them on that 1240 I got, and it works nice and I don't have many rocks to worry about. So by and large you set them and there's spots in the field that, "Dang, I want to put that a little lower." Then you're going to talk to somebody, other people that just have the precision lift. Well, you hit something, you hit a root ball so you're no-tilling beans and corn. Well that does this.

Yeah, you want down rather than...

Sometimes you almost want a down or something just to... You bring it up, you set it here and then just have a little bit of pressure on top just to keep it there. Which I...

Circle steel plates, about four of them on each side.

Oh, yeah.

Go down as far as you want to go.

But then as soon as you hit that rock, it goes, woo. I don't know about these high speed planters, mine is still slow and dumb, but I do four and a half, five mile an hour. I can't imagine hitting a rock at 10.

So if you guys are running roll cleaners on the strip-till, are you running them on your planter?

Mm-hmm.

Okay. Just for what happens over winter? Blowing them out or just a little extra insurance?

Since I do no-till on the beans. I have them on there anyways, so I don't have complicated... They're just pin adjust. They're dawns with, they're the scissor wheels, so I really like what the strip-till scissors did. So I was like, ah, maybe I can just get the regular pin adjust ones. I had the Kinze, like the ones that they showed with the floating. That was a lot. I mean it was a lot of weights and I was like, I think I want simpler. I wanted something that was a little tidier and I know that's not the thing, but for strip-till I don't need to get a lot of residue moved. It just needs to maybe get the occasional clump or break across or something like that.

Sure.

I don't get real concerned about row cleaners. I mean, you can spend a lot of money on row cleaners or you can spend [inaudible 00:31:20] row cleaners.

Yep.

Well, with mine, with the closing wheels, they originally come, concave like this. I flipped them around because neighbor had it that way and I actually looked and I was like, okay. I kind of like what it does. So it's hitting the back of the blade and every once in a while I'll get a root ball just on the edge and I don't want that to hit my gauge wheel, so I just have a row cleaner or I have them on that bottom-

Planter with them on anyway.

And then the other thing is sometimes there's in the spring, you don't... How should I say it? That dirt is almost too fluffy when you do it in the spring and it dries out, especially in the sand. Then you get that whipper out there to push everything away so it's flat, you got even more moisture profile going down through it. It just seems to work. You can't go too deep otherwise you ball everything up with mud, but you kind of got to find that fine line and go.

Ours is a little cloudy when we strip-till, I mean we're usually so dry or whatever, or can be a little frost in the very top. That chunks just start dissolving our-

In the spring?

So we're always kicking them every day out there.

Sure. Just to clean it out.

Just to smooth it up a bit.

That makes sense. Yeah.

Don't really need it because of [inaudible 00:32:41].

Just to do a little tillage in a way.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Believe it or not, you can strip-till in the snow too, by the way.

Nope.

Yep.

Not with liquid you can't. With dry.

With dry. There you go. Yep.

With dry you can.

But it's a bonus.

It's a bonus.

If you do it with liquid, then you figure out how to replace those diaphragms in a diaphragm pump because it got too cold.

Let's make that 30, a couple inches of frost is okay.

Big thanks to Nate, Pat, and Kendall for answering Michaela's calls ahead of the National strip-tillage conference and also to Luke for being so willing to ask questions. We're eager to hear if Luke ripped off the bandaid and convinced his dad and brothers to try strip-till off the check back in with him for a later podcast episode. Also, thanks to our sponsor, Montag Manufacturing, for helping to make this strip-till podcast series possible from all of us here at Strip-Till Farmer. Thanks for listening. I'm Noah Newman. Have a great day.