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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Montag Mfg., 3 successful strip-tillers share some of their top strategies and lessons learned from their strip-till journey. 

Paul Dubbels of Fergus Falls, Minn., Larry Tombaugh of Streator, Ill., and Jon Stevens of Rock Creek, Minn., take questions from the audience at the 2023 National Strip-Tillage Conference in a workshop-style session.

Dubbels, Tombaugh and Stevens provide insight into how they’ve overcome numerous strip-till hurdles, and touch on several topics including the differences between shanks and coulters, how to successfully incorporate cover crops in the berm, nitrogen management and more! 

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

Great to have you with us for another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Montag Manufacturing. Thanks for tuning in. I'm technology editor Noah Newman. On today's episode, Paul Dubbels of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, Larry Tombaugh of Streator, Illinois, and Jon Stevens of Rock Creek, Minnesota take questions from the audience of the 2023 National Strip-Tillage Conference in a workshop style session.

Dubbels, Tombaugh, and Stevens provide insight into how they've overcome numerous strip-till hurdles and also touch on several topics including the differences between shanks and coulters, how to successfully incorporate cover crops in the berm, nitrogen management, and more.

So, let's listen into the discussion led by Strip-Till Farmer Managing Editor Michaela Paukner at the podium as I roam the crowd with a mic.

Paul, why don't you start us off?

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Farming with my brother, Fergus Falls, which is about an hour southeast of Fargo, kind of different than from many of you. It's always cold almost, clay soil, so some things to work with there that are different. I've been at this since 2013. We actually started strip-tilling in 2007 with some equip funded strip-till bars.

I did a yield comparison, it was the same as our no-till, so we just kind of set it aside for a few years and then eventually took our fertilizer attachments off the planter, put it on a bar and I guess that made us strip-tillers.

Hi, I'm Larry Tombaugh from Streator, Illinois. It's about 45 miles northeast of here. I did my first no-till in 1973, when I got home from college and that was a disaster. The neighbors got a good laugh out of it, so it was worthwhile in some respects. But then we were working through.

I grew up on a 600-acre dairy farm and the cows left, then I had hogs and then we had cattle. But my dad passed away early at 66 in 1994 and at that point, I took over and we started right in. I was fortunate enough to have neighbors that were strip-tilling, so we started strip-tilling then, implemented cover crops as we went.

And so, now I'm farming about 480 acres and we're doing a lot of biologicals, humates, and strip-till. We used to make mistakes on our farm. Now we've renamed our farm, Larry Tombaugh Experimental Farms. So, those mistakes are now experiments.

John Stevens, Rock Creek, Minnesota, straight north from the Twin Cities, about an hour up the interstate, a spot nobody even acknowledges Ag in that part of the state. Got the beef herd and trying to bring small, learn how to do small grains and bring them back in the rotation to capture some opportunities with cover crops and crop rotation. Otherwise, a bulk of the farm is still corn and beans.

Since '13, been dabbling with the no-till strip-till. The first two generations of strip-till were just row crop cultivators that we welded up to make work with an old Ag Systems air cart, because if you're conventional minded like I need to see if this works here and now we ended up with a B&H bar and a Bourgault air cart. Now we're trying to figure out how to do covers and everything with the strip-till.

Thank you. Any questions immediately from the audience?

Thank you. I used to strip-till back in the late '80s and then quit in the mid '90s, went to 15-inch corn. Back in those days, of course, we were using markers and it was helter-skelter and it really didn't have row cleaners and things, but we did use a shank and it was pretty impressive looking corn.

So, my first question is to each one of you, as you prepare your strips, I'm assuming you do it in the fall, but do you use a shank or do you just use cultures, would be my first question to each one of you.

Alphabetically by heights, what are we doing?

Okay. We started out with, like I said earlier, equip funded Dawn Pluribus and then when we took the opener, we had a single disc opener on the planet for fertilizer. And when we put that on a bar, we pretty much gutted out our pluribus because we found out we were making a big strip, which was great, but on our hills we were getting some washouts.

So, we made our own version that displaces very little dirt. I mean, it's barely a strip, but it has pretty much eliminated erosion. So, in our hills we do everything in the spring and we might try in the fall sometime, but so much of it is hills that's been our focus.

I'm kind of embarrassed to say this is the first year I actually no-tilled all my beans, but we started with strip-till and as I said, that we had neighbors that had progressive bars with fertilizer on an anhydrous and so they got us into the strip-till early on. As we progressed, I bought an old, old red ball and we never put dry on it, but I would put liquid with pulling a tank and we put a couple gallons of fish with 18 gallons of water and that was pretty amazing.

Some of the results, we got our calcium, our first SAP test, we were having trouble getting our calcium up and the SAP test was off the charts for that. But we're looking to try and this past year my neighbor got a brand new bar and I had him put 40 pounds of Humic down. We do a lot with humates.

And we're looking to expand a few things, getting some other guys that may be able to do it for me this year, but I don't have my own equipment, so.

Spring strip till with the erosion and stuff on highly erodable soil, I think Jody Hughes summed up our area really well with her scientific description of our soil as Ic.

Ic.

In the 80s and 90s when the U of M and a lot of these universities were pushing no-till, one of the older neighbors went down to one of her conferences and said, "Well, what'd you do in our area?" And she said, "Where are you at?" And he told her. She says, "Keep doing tillage. Don't bother."

And so, we run a spring shank. We got up to 9 inches of gloomy sand on top of infinite yellow clay and it gets really tight. And so, if I fall strip-till we got the potential blowouts. But at the same time, the fall strip-till has, I've done a few fields of it and surprisingly the whole water management has kind of changed to where, that heel doesn't move all the water down to the low spot anymore, so maybe we can try in fall again.

The fall does allow the berm to get conditioned a little bit where spring strip feels nice, it gives that shatter, really fracture that soil, make a nice seedbed, and then put our nutrients down in the spring without any worries of leaching and stuff over the winter. And so-

Have you folks thought about putting some kind of a cover over that berm in the fall, some kind of an air sheeter that'll blow right on top of that berm like an oaks or something, to help hold that berm through the winter and spring, or is that not... is that's out of the question?

Yeah, we've tried it. A victory for us would be when we put our rye on in a strip that it actually emerges. So, I mean we just don't get any growth in the fall by the time harvest is done. So, yeah, we've played with it, but it's like so many people, these cover crops are a challenge for us because we don't have any season.

Yeah. We actually use cereal rye and then put the strips in and we have really good soil. You can really make mistakes and it won't be a big problem. But I have pictures of me planting with RTK and foot tall cereal rye into the strips in the spring and it works well.

I would just say too, Michigan State and Indiana are doing a regenerative Ag study of people that have been doing it for quite a long time. And I've been fortunate enough that they've asked me to talk about it. And so, then they came over and did a test on our soil and somebody's going to have to tell me what a 11 percent carbon in our soil is. I think that's good and 5.1 percent organic matter and CECs of 19 to 32, so I'd probably have a little different soil than you guys have.

You have soil.

Oh, I have soil.

Do you have dirt?

I pulled the fertilizer tubes off. I'm a huge fan of science. And so, like a Joe Gruber kind of thing with his bio-stripping you like, it made sense to me. It clicked with my brain and so, I did it. I pulled the tubes off the fertilizer and so I'll make them some fall strips, let it blow the covers on and it actually kind of worked.

And I think with a little bit of practice, different species, like Paul had said, there's a lot of years we can't fall strip-till because there's a lot of years that ground has froze before I mean, we've combined beans in snow. I mean it is what it is.

And so, the fall opportunities are limited. And so, with the cover crops, a lot of the cover crops are going in a very early corn to do anything. But that worked I think with some practice and species selection.

We're from Southern Indiana. So, we start shelling corn first September and we run a strip-till behind our farm berm per se, I think we can get some growth if we have any kind of weather some time in September, October?

Oh, I'd think so.

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.

Unlike folks in North?

Your neighbors still tell you you're too far north and too cold and too wet. Don't they?

Just add to the cover crop thing. We've flown on rye as early as August 1st and as late as October 1st. And it really doesn't seem to matter. If it comes up, it comes up. In fact, this last fall we flew it on and basically nothing came up because it was too dry. And we did have a stand though, it germinated in the spring and we got something.

It's never been a wild success, but it's never been an abject failure either.

That's why it's a cover crop and not a cash crop.

Yeah.

You got to have some forgiveness.

Yeah. We've tried to fly on cereal rye a number of times and more often than not, it wasn't successful. So, we plant some earlier hybrids for us, 107-day corn or so, 507, 107, take it off and harvest it to 22 percent to 23 percent. As soon as we can get that off, we want to be knocking that down with our residue digester while there's still juice in the stalks and then seed the cover crop and then when we get time, we'll get the scripts put in.

We did do...the old timers, you could frost seed clover cereal rye and all that kind of stuff. And so, we can take advantage of the frozen ground and not create a mud mess. And it works. It works really well, like the winter rye and clovers and stuff. It's just a management thing done the next year of what you want to do with it, time of termination, monitoring, moisture, all that kind of stuff.

But to stop the erosion in strip-till with the covers, it's a great idea and it's there.

I might interject, I said this is the first year I've planted completely no-till into beans and moist starting out April 10th or so, I'd planted some in the snow, but I was really having trouble and then I had my neighbor come over with his 40-foot roller and he rolled those stalks down and then it was easy-peasy. It just went so much better.

And when we've been putting the cover crops in the fall while then we'll have him come, roll it down, roll the stalks down and it gets the cover crop a little bit touched with the dirt, so we get a better germination out of that. I like that roller a lot.

For erosion on slips most of my ground Northwest Iowa, it's pretty flat, but going into the waterway may have some good slopes. I got a Dawn Pluribus high speed and I got an Orthman shank. I use the Orthman for putting anhydrous on. But when I get done on those slopes it may look stupid. I take the track from the tank and I drive across all the slopes. So, if I grab a blowout, it will only go so far and that's in the fall.

By the spring, those tracks are worn out, but it'll stop a blowout from going all the way down. And that shank, if you hit a rock, you got to dig it and with a high speed Pluribus I can go out and freshen. I got a nice slew speed back.

But I'm just saying if you want to stop a blowout, drive across the field, it may look stupid, but you got to stop a blowout going all the way down the slope.

You know what, one challenge we have is your hills in Iowa, to me they're huge, they're long. Ours are really short and sharp, so it's hard to do the contour thing because the hill might only run for a hundred, 200 feet. We have a couple fields that have a 100-foot elevation change, but it's just up and down, up and down.

It's all relative. I used to help manage some farms in Arkansas and that was completely flat. And I was talking to the farmer and he says, "Oh, you see that hillside out there?" And I said, "Hillside, where?" He said, "Oh yeah, it's 9/10ths of a foot higher out there in the middle there."

I have a question from the Whova app. They want to know how are you managing your nitrogen?

Oh, we got schooled again this year, we had some issues with the planter tractor, so I got too far ahead with the strip tiller and our strips got all dried out. And typically, we put on 50 units of vent and then all the PKs, zinc, sulfur in the spring strip. And so, I stripped it and realized at the end that one of the tubes had fallen off behind the hitch.

Well, we came in, we had no moisture in the strip, so we no-till the corn in between the strips, which actually worked really well, came up even. But then as time progressed that one tube that came off and laid it basically put all the fertilizer on top of the ground between the strips. Well now, when we came back and planted, we were actually now on top of that strip of fertilizer. And in the wetter soil conditions that surface applied fertilizer was the greenest grow by far. I mean it outgrew everything. And where it was better soil conditions and it didn't make any difference. But then we side dress, the rest of our nitrogen gets put on.

So, I don't like dry fertilizer and then I really hate anhydrous. So, my neighbor had this new machine and he got 60 acres put on making my strips with 40 pounds of humic and the engineers were out seven times trying to fix it. He couldn't go through bean ground. So, it was getting late and anhydrous was cheap. It was only $1,400 a ton. So, I called up the co-op and had them come and put anhydrous on 100 pounds the acre. So, I had a strip to plant in and the rest of my bean ground.

Then in the spring shout outs to Jason in Precision Planting, we put quite a bit of stuff on with our planter, put the PGRs through the center of the FurrowJet and then put 3-18-18 with Envita or SoyFX, INFX, some biologicals. Plus I work with a fellow that makes a product called Whole Shots and it's got about 14 different products including concentrated seaweeds, growthful concentrated seawater, a bunch of special things.

And then, I'm convinced that Y drops don't work unless you're hula or dowdy and have irrigation, one year out of three that might work. So, we side dress with end placers, which is just, you can go up to 10 miles an hour and we're putting 45 gallons the acre. So, we shoot toward the row and then it's got cover boards, so it's covered.

And then, we're still doing a lot of foliar stuff. I make my own compost tea. And so, we're mixing that with a lot of other dry soluble fertilizers and boron and stuff, and doing foliar things. I mean, I do enough foliar that my wife thinks I'm having some affair with a girl named Hagy, so.

Before strip-till and no-till we used to be broadcast typical before planter and then right after planter, and that was your nitrogen. And so, from where we were to where we are now, we've been pretty consistent since 2018, I believe about 25 to 30 percent down. And so, the best was like 0.7 on an end credit. And for my area and for common wisdom of my area, that's phenomenal in context. And I like to relate it to myself.

So, I go back and forth. I do some AMS because strip-till and AMS is like nitrogen, highly volatile, really can move fast. And so, with the strip-till we saw that we can really reduce the AMS and still not have sulfur deficiencies. The nitrogen we're learning all the time. We're trying to move forward, get better.

So, we're slowly weaning off of a lot of the urea and nitrogen in the strip-till and Y dropping on the sides.

No, you didn't hit me. That's what you saw. I got it.

But we're also bringing in the SAP testing and the Haney testing to where we can see what nitrogen we have in the soil, what nitrogen we have in the plant, and then also looking at the micronutrients, their interaction, is it the scientific antagonism or something of that relationship through there. And so, if we can do better on them little things to keep moving us forward kind of deal.

And so, yeah, nitrogen, I'm a mile and a half or two miles as the crow flies from the St. Croix River, which again is just north of 3 million people. Our county is 30 percent Ag land, but it's a 100 percent blamed for the cities having a dirty water, dirty river.

So, our nitrogen and phosphorus for us, we're under a huge microscope in the St. Croix watershed. And so phosphorus, we don't even bother. I can retail phosphorus. If you've got enough money to be buying DAP and MAP, you're great. That's awesome. But otherwise, actually manage it, different lecture but context of my area, nitrogen and phosphorus are very serious business.

Alex, let's burn a quick time out to share a message from our sponsor. 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 crest. It could be mounted to tillage, implements, combines and self-propelled high clearance machines. The second new product is the 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.

This person says we're transitioning to strip-till from conventional tillage. We normally chop our stalk with a stalk chopper. Should we leave them or continue to chop them?

Well, I actually asked a neighbor to let me try strip-tilling his cornstalks that he had run a chopping head on, after I got through all the drifts of cornstalks I said, thank you very much. And we just run a conventional corn head. And in our case it's 3412, so it just chews it off to the height you're running and that's about it.

I don't even have a combine. Our neighbor, we've had a good relationship right next to each other for the last 20 years. So we worked together combining, but we're going to probably do something a little bit different. My neighbor has great planes, vertical till and with a cedar on it. I think we're probably going to get our residue digester on and hit it with that and then put our strips in.

I'll boldly say if a massive residue problem, you got a soil life problem, not a residue problem. I would say it's in context of his area and environment and tools that he has. If you had a non-chopping corn head, you could update to knife rolls.

I wouldn't spend money just to process stalks unless it's a problem for your strip to a unit. We've got the Lexion head, so I can shut them on and off and come springtime. I mean, science will say you have soil life going year round, but-

It slows down.

...From October to end of April nothing's happening. And yet if we can go in there and you just see by late April, early May, a majority of that residue is gone and it's just worm castings everywhere but that is amazing. But with a good row cleaner on the strip tiller quality strip-till unit, it's up to him. The snowpack thing, I've done a bunch of side by sides compared to the neighbors that till the stocks down and the tall stocks were drought prone soil even though we get tons and tons of rain and snow.

By leaving them stocks tall, they collect the sunlight and you can see that snow melt down that stock and start to expose the soil. And I've got it on film many times of our standing stocks with all that snowpack is still ready to go sooner than the chisel plowed stocks across the road. And it's hard for your brain to wrap around change and things are different.

Again, I wouldn't spend money on things mother nature can do unless it's a problem.

I'm from Green Bay, Wisconsin, looking for a little advice on anybody that knows anything about long-term cereal rye for cover crop. And let me enlighten you a little bit on our background here a little bit. I've been doing strip-till since 1992. We did cover crop plots in the early 80s with our county extension. So, we kind of learned about the difficulties with cereal rye back then.

We currently strip-till with own drykay with the strip bar. Our soils are rolling in heavy clay, so we can't do nothing in the fall and we generally run our strip cart 24 hours ahead of the planter. We do twin row corn and beans in that. We've also got some livestock on the landscape. We've got cow calf operation. I'm an agronomist as well, do custom app and scouting in the area.

So, my problem is with cover crops through the CSP thing, we ventured back into it again. We probably dinking around with it about 10, 12 years now. Had excellent results of tillage, radishes, stuff like that. But local soil and water people are kind of begging us. It's like, well, why don't you play around cereal rye. That's why I got my butt kicked in the 80s on it. Since we left 80 bushel of corn on the table with cereal rye.

Well, management has changed. There's a better way to do it. Plant green. Okay. So, we started that and we dinked around with the skip row wheat and skip row rye for covers planting into that skip. So, we have no competition for our twin row beans and our twin row corn, and strip tilling. It's easy to do on RTK.

But I've had great results with that stuff up until this year. Last fall, we kind of got a little carried away. We planted pretty much every acre on our farm into cereal rye and we drilled it on 7.5-inch space.

Well, mother nature kicked us with the drought this year. So, right now it appears in several counties that I do work in our area, probably the worst crops that I've seen in the country are in our area following that cereal rye for cover crop. It doesn't matter how or when or what or who. The only difference is, I guess if you went to the right church and prayed to the right guy, and you got rain on your farm, and then the next guy didn't. That's the only difference.

But looking for some advice on this, our plots in the 80s showed us that oats and barley worked awesome because it was dead in the spring, it gave you a ground cover. Didn't have to kill it. Wheat, triticale, rye, you got to burn that stuff off for herbicides. So, that's a cost, but we didn't see any yield reduction on the next crop, like we did with the rye.

So, coming back now in the future here, what we're currently doing this year, our corn and our beans are probably half size, a 100 percent of our nitrogen's tied up. There's plots in the area by other watershed districts that show that a 2-week difference in terminating that rye, the corn is double in size. And I can't fathom that this is not going to be reflected in yield come harvest time. Sure, the jury's not out yet, but there's going to be a yield drag, a yield drop here, but we're on pretty tough soil.

Generally, the rye is planted after corn silage or soybeans in our area. We've planted rye as late as Thanksgiving and miraculously you can row it at Christmastime. We're close to the Shore lake, Michigan, so we got that microclimate that keeps us a little warmer in the fall. But historically our erosion events are heavy, heavy erosion happens in the spring months and that's when we're targeting our cereal rye and covers to have a root mass to hold that soil.

So, I guess my question is to you three guys on stage or anybody else in this room here that has experienced extreme detrimental effect with cereal rye had a corn to enlighten me a little bit on what they did to it or if maybe things haven't progressed here far as they should have been.

Yeah, we kind of got a good trial on that this year. We had a bunch of prevent plant and we put rye cover on it last fall, so early April or not early April, the snow was still on the ground but early May we sprayed it out. It was just starting to get going. It was probably a foot high. Frost was out 8 inches or so. So it held up, held to spray up good.

So, we killed it out entirely ahead of because knowing we were going to go with corn and I didn't want to try planting green with corn, but we put 50 units of end down in the strip and our strip, the fertilizer side of the strip goes about 5 inches deep. The other side of the strip is basically a closing disc and that goes about 3 inches deep. So, we had dead rye and we had nitrogen in the strip.

And in our case, and we've flown on rye, I don't know, I'm going to say 3, 4, 5 different years. And always if we have that nitrogen there, the rye is just a non-issue. It's like I think of it as like continuous corn, I mean as far as residue. But for us we have to get the nitrogen in the ground. You can't just spread it on top unless it rains or it's really wet, like I described earlier. But in general, if you get that nitrogen in the ground underneath the residue, whether it's continuous corn or rye, it works.

In our area very few people are doing cover crops ahead of corn. My neighbor got really burned with cereal rye and he's been putting winter barley in less allelopathic problems and stuff, but I don't know, the corn's too valuable. Guys aren't trying it.

The first question I'd say, why just rye? The second question is you got cattle, seize the opportunity, if you're making silage, I'd be out there, we three, holding that thing out with buckwheat to annual rye grab just some oats, just other great stuff, hairy veg. Oh man, add value to that silage.

And everybody wants winter rye because I don't know what the catch was with cover crops in the last few years. Just everybody has to do winter rye and this year everybody rather had pictures of just rye killing that corn crop. And that comes down to species selection versus the problem you're trying to fix. Management of that thing, timing of termination, that kind of stuff.

Winter rye is kind of funny because if I'm in the Red River Valley, I'm going to terminate winter rye standing up with chemical because I want sunlight to hit my soil. If I'm up by us or Western Wisconsin, I'm going to roll that rye down to get as much cover on that soil as I can to protect that soil from the sunlight. And so, it's the same tool being used quite differently around.

And so, yeah, you've got potentials of a carbon sink there. I don't know how to defend the yield loss on a year like this. It's an extreme scenario. I'll say that yield doesn't indicate success of a cover crop. When you're first starting cover cropping, we're trained as corn and bean guys to go into our co-op and well, two bushel response. And every product we'd ever do is a two bushel response or five bushel response.

And I'd say yield has no indication on success of a cover crop when you're beginning, because what did it do for you? You already had your system perfected to the best you could. Every year you adapt and change. And so, what possibly could that cover crop do in a couple months time of it being there to offer you more yield?

The success of the cover crop, did it fix the erosion you were at? Did it change soil structure, water infiltration or runoff, anything like that down the line? Can we start checking carbon PFAs and did it add anything to the soil, soil life, texture, smell?

It's a much larger conversation. We'll never leave here if we actually want to talk about the soil and the cover crops, and management of it. But in your situation, you got cattle, there's nothing you can do wrong. You have cows that is your garbage disposal of the farm. It's embarrassing to let the cows that what should have been a good corn field and now why is he grazing that field? But you turn it over to AUMs and you can still make money. But I mean, we can joke, you can't have a failure with cattle, but it's painful, but seize the opportunity with cows. Yeah.

Someone asked what can you do to avoid a yield hit when switching to strip-till?

Good question. In our case, we started no tilling in 1982, then we ridge tilled for a while. Then in the 90s, it got so wet that getting the ridge-till getting it all done, the cultivating part was impossible. So, we actually no-till on top of the ridges for a while. And then it's like, well, huh, I guess the next step is to just strip-till.

And so, that we've always had that residue and just used to it. And there's kind of aside to all these comments about you got to rip and you got to use cover crops, get soil stability. In our case, we run a thousand bushel grain cart and it goes wherever it needs to go. I make no attempt to run on tram lines because one of our best operators, like I said, we have a lot of hills, some fields are very scenic. He would go to the top of that hill every time he dump, he'd drive to the top of the nearest hill and just sit there and look around.

And when we look at our yield maps or look at our planting down pressure maps in the spring, you can't see any evidence of where that grain cart went. So, it kind of makes me wonder, we've been doing the cover crop just because that's the thing to do, but we already have a lot of residue. We don't get stuck with a combine regardless of how much it rains. So, maybe we should not worry about it and just be happy with all the residue we have.

We didn't really have any yield drag when we went to strip-till and I was trying to compete against the legacy. My grandfather had 150 bushel corn in 1945 and my dad had 207 bushel corn in 1958, but I wasn't able to break 250 till I got roundup ready corn. But when we went to strips, we were getting up for too long, we got about 285, so I didn't feel we had a yield drag.

I would think it'd come back to checking the basics. We got some sandier stuff that if you're making a quality strip, make sure you're doing a good job. You're not having air pockets, you're not trenching too deep. Your berming discs aren't creating water paths next to the berm. If that seed trench is good, then it would come back to plant or performance.

And our soil isn't that sensitive, but out in central Minnesota, you visit some farmers out there and I don't know, Paul, if you've noticed it. Well, you said you got off strip and did just fine. Some of them guys down by Grove City and some of the more black flat area, they'll claim if they get off the strip a little bit, some drift or whatever, they can see the little bit of depression in the corn. The stand isn't quite as good as on the strip.

I can't fathom in an honest scenario, if you did the basics to where you would lose money coming from full till to strip-till. We've got knobs in the field. You got the Anoka sand plains to the Southwest of this. But we've got knobs in the field that half a percent organic matter and you'll never make a bottle no matter how big the hose is running. It's a coffee filter. And the strip-till has allowed us to go into spots like that, that on our yield map.

The good is still good. That didn't change a whole lot. But if you've got this little couple acre knob out in the middle that when you're a conventional tiller, no-till, the maps look very similar in the big red. And after some years of strip-till and covers, now it's kind of green, light green, yellow, and the red isn't just this perfect shape, it's coming back. And that average, instead of having a 30 or 40 bushel corn on that spot, when the rest of the field is 150, that spot is now 80 and 90 bushel corn. And so, I am wracking my brain to, other than a mistake between the strip-till plant or a soil scenario where strip-till would go backwards.

Good advice. And with that, since we're about out of time here, I'll ask all three of you for any final thoughts or piece of advice that you'd give everyone here with us today?

Just got to stick your neck out and do whatever you're going to do next to the highway and let everybody see what you're doing.

Yeah. I mean, I'm the worst farmer in three townships, but just keep on trying stuff.

Yeah, there's quite a few people here today that we got to meet that are getting into strip-till for the first time and it's kind of me like just do it. The covers and the weird things and stuff like that. Yep, yep. You can do that out back on a small scale. Now with the technology of all this stuff, you can be doing rate trials on the go as you're going. You're not out setting up stakes anymore while you're driving. You just up and down rates and your yield map, which just comes, you don't even have to remember where it was. You got your application maps, get your harvest maps, you do fertility's although, do your own research and that kind of stuff. Have some fun with.

And that'll wrap things up for this week's edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast.

Many thanks to our sponsor, Montag Manufacturing, for helping to make this podcast series possible.

From all of us here at Strip-Till Farmer, thanks for listening.