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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Montag Mfg., Smithville, Ga., strip-tiller Alex Harrell shares perspective on his world record-breaking soybean yield in 2023.

The 33-year-old set a new soybean yield record with 206.7997 bushels per acre, topping his mentor, Randy Dowdy’s 2019 yield of 190.23 bushels per acre. 

Strip-till and cover crops are a crucial piece to Harrell’s record-breaking formula. He drills in a mix of cereal rye, oats, triticale and daikon rash at a rate of 35 pounds per acre in the fall. Then in early April, he uses a Schlagel Rapid-Till to make strips right over the cover crop ground. 

Harrell gives us the inside scoop on his operation and the keys to growing high-yielding soybeans. We also catch up with Schlagel Manufacturing’s Jonathan Spence, who sold Harrell the Rapid Till strip-till unit that helped him break the record.  

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.

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Full Transcript

Great to have you with us for another edition of the Strip Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Montag Manufacturing. I'm your host, Noah Newman, Technology Editor. 2023 was a banner year for Alex Harrell, the Smithville, Georgia strip tiller shattered his mentor Randy Doughty's world record with a soybean yield of 206 bushels per acre. So we gave Alex a call moments after the big news broke for his instant reaction. Take a listen.

It was pretty steep. It was surreal to see it, and like I told everybody yesterday, I wanted Randy to be one of the very first calls I made, but unfortunately, he was in the middle of an open heart triple bypass surgery while we were cutting that pot. I wasn't able to, like I said, but he's out recovering and I'm just waiting to hear from him now. But no, it was pretty neat. Like I said, he has paved the path for me, just proving that that kind of stuff can be done in the southeast in Georgia.

Oh no, I'm sorry to hear that, he had to go through that surgery. Is he doing well? Have you heard anything?

Yeah, he's out and he's doing well.

Okay, that's good.

Still recovering.

Good to hear.

I haven't spoken to him, but his wife called me, congratulated me yesterday, and she said he's in recovery and just still kind of out of it, but he's awake today. Like I said, I'm hoping to hear from him sometime today maybe.

Well, good to hear that. It's amazing what heart surgeries can do now. They've come a long way.

Yes, it is.

I know, I saw Caleb Trial's name came up too. I did an article on him a couple of months ago actually, so he's your consultant?

Yeah, he's my scouting consultant. Yes.

What were some of the unique features of that plan you developed? You referenced coming up with a plan to develop a high yielding crop?

It's just a systems approach. I mean, there's no silver bullet by any means. It's just a lot of good products put on at the right time. A lot of planning, and some luck involved also, and a lot of good weather. Just one rain event at the wrong time could have ruined it, and too much hot weather could have ruined it. We had a weather event we had to jump over, like I said, right after planting. We had attacking rain, that hurt our stand right off the bat, and that kind of let the air out of me. But we came out of it, and then we had a big rain event. We had about 15 inches in 10 days in June. That did not help matters by any means. Those were really the only two weather events that we had not go our way. Other than that, we had sunny weather warm days, but they weren't overly hot, and we had cool nights that helped them a lot during pollination.

That 10 day rain event in early June, that kind of had to get you concerned a little bit. I mean, how were you able to overcome that?

Fortunately, right after it got out it turned hot and sunny, dried it up, and we have spray drones, so fortunately we were able to keep spraying even through those rain events. We could spray whatever we needed to in between rains and we kept it pumped up and kept it sprayed, growing. We never really deviated from a plan. We tweaked it some according to what our tissue samples and everything showed, but we stuck with the plan that we had in mind. We didn't have the stand we wanted. We were hoping to have a few more plants per acre come up than we did. Even after that, we never veered off from our original plan as if we had a perfect stand.

Yeah, and it said that you initially thought that maybe you'd get around 150 bushels per acre. When did you realize that you had a chance to break the 200 mark?

When the scale ticket came back. Even after harvest, after reproduction stage, I knew we had really good beans. I knew they were probably 150 bushel beans. I didn't think they were much better than that, if any, mainly because I've never seen any better than that. Our pod counts and everything were coming back in that 150 range. Where we were messing up on our pod counts, is we were counting our beans as weighing 2,500 beans per pound on average, and we actually ended up about 1700 beans per pound. We didn't just have triple the pods out there like everybody's thinking. We just had a lot bigger, heavier beans.

What role did strip-till play in this? What strip-till unit do you use?

I use a Schlagel Rapid Till, and I strip into a four-way cover crop mix. I plan a fall cover crop mix of triticale rye oats and daikon radish, and I ran a Schlagel Rapid Till right through that.

Oh, so you build the strips right over the cover crops?

Yes, I plan to cover in the fall, and I burn it down in the spring and then strip through it and plant it. I'll burn it down, come in a couple, three weeks later, run the strip till, the rapid till, and then plant usually a day or two behind that.

So you're building strips in what, early April is it or March?

Yeah, well this field would've been early April

Early April, got you.

End of March, 1st of April. We planted that field on April 5th.

Have you been strip tilling for a long time or are you pretty new to it?

Six years now.

More from Alex in just a minute, but first let's hear from the guy who sold Alex the rapid till strip till unit that helped him break the record. Jonathan Spence is the regional sales manager for Schlagel Manufacturing. We caught up with him at the Farm Progress Show in Decatur, Illinois to talk about the role strip till, specifically with rapid till, played in Alex's success.

So one of your customers, Alex Harrell, he broke the soybean world record of 206 bushels per acre using this machine right here. How did this give him the advantage to reach that kind of yield?

We talked about this. Alex was in the booth this morning, and we didn't have much. He's a pretty popular guy right now. South Georgia, they say, is hotter than train smoke, so he's having a good time up here. One thing that I did want to make sure that we did get a chance to talk about though is how we build a strip, and how we differentiate ourselves from competition, and how this machine actually works.

We do something a little different. We run the depth of this machine off the rear basket. That's our gauge wheel for the whole machine, and that gives us a unique opportunity to firm that seed-bed up a little differently than most companies do. For Alex, you go to those meetings and you listen. You talk to guys about yield potential, and the guys that are winning, and I'm not trying to put words in Alex's mouth, but the guys that are really having good success with that, talk about seed to soil contact. Our whole company, everything we sell is based around having seed to soil contact when you're planting.

For this machine to be able to have a shank rip, everything folds back in with our wavies, and then to get compressed here on the back, we really give that seed a good chance to have good germination, and even germination across the field. I was at a conference not too long ago and I heard somebody mention if you're going to be in a competition like that, especially on corn, if those corn plants don't emerge within six hours, I think it was six hours or 12 hours of each other, you don't even have a chance of winning that competition, which was amazing to me. Which tells you it has to be pretty perfect, and near perfect seed-bed conditions would be no voids whatsoever. We do a really, really good job of having a void in the seed-bed that's ready for planting.

Good stuff there from Jonathan. Let's burn a quick time out. Here's a message from our sponsor, Montag Manufacturing. Montag 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 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 with Alex as he shares some of the keys to his high yielding formula.

Just kind of give me the basics about your operation. How many acres, what crops you grow, and where you're located.

Yeah, I'm in Smithville, S-M-I-T-H-V-I-L-L-E, Georgia. I farm in Lee and Sumter County. I farm about 3000 acres now, cutback from right at 6,000 last year.

And are you first generation farmer?

No, I farm with my dad, Harold Farms partnership.

Take me through the timeline of the field that broke the yield, starting with last year's harvest. What was the process like? How'd you prepare it? If you just kind of want to take us through that.

Yeah, we harvested corn off of that field last year in August, September timeframe, I don't know exactly. Then we pulled one acre grid samples, soil samples across to that entire field. That's when it started was when the soil probe goes in the ground, and then we variable rated lime according to those soil samples. Then we applied gypsum as well to help build calcium based saturations, then pre-plant.

We planted a cover crop during the fall as well. Then in the spring we burnt down the cover crop. We applied poultry litter, chicken litter, and then we planted in April, early April. We planted 85,000 seed per acre, final stand of 77 plus. That contest plot was planted somewhere around 1:00 AM. We planted in the middle of the night because we knew a rain was coming, but we didn't know it'd be that big or we wouldn't have planted. We got a packing rain that kept us from getting a perfect stand.

Other than that, only other weather hurdle we had was a big rain in early June. We got 15 inches of rain in 10 days. Other than those two, the weather was pretty good.

Then as far as equipment goes, what kind of planter do you have?

I've got a custom-built planter. It's kind of a mix between a John Deere planter and a precision. It's a John Deere frame, and got a lot of precision planting parts on it though.

What are some of the unique characteristics of it that kind of give you that upper hand?

We've got Delta Force downforce, which is hydraulic downforce. It reads the ground pressure and each individual row has sensors on it, and we change three times per second as we're going across the field, each individual row. We've got the hydraulic downforce, and then we've got electric drive meters, the V-drive meters. Then one big thing is furrow force on the back, our closing system. We run a two stage closing system called furrow force. We've got an airbag that we can change our pressure as our closing system. That helps a lot with the emergence. Then we run a 3x3x3 fertility system on each side of the row. All that's ran through precision also. Then we run it in furrow system as well. We run an in furrow in a seed trench and then we're running, we don't put fertility in furrow, but we put fertility three inches to each side and three inches deep ran through the vioclass system.

Then in terms of when, what, and how much fertilizers you're applying throughout the growing season, how does that work for you?

We pull a tissue test every Monday starting at V1 stage all the way up until desiccation. Every Monday we pull a tissue sample, and then we base our fertility applications off of that. The trend line we build from that. Not off of one tissue sample, but we pull them every week at the same time, and we build our trend line, and like I said, we can see if anything's gradually declining or increasing, and we can make our applications based off of those.

Drones kind of helped you out when the weather got bad.

Yeah, we spray. A lot of our foliar fertility is done with spray drones.

When you're making your strips for the strip till, about how deep do you go?

Anywhere from six inches to 16 inches. I mean it just depends on what system we're running. What I'm doing going forward is I run an inline ripper in front, in the fall or winter, and then I'll use the rapid till as a strip freshener right in front of the planter. The contest field was around 10 inches deep.

What kind of impact did the cover crops have when you pair it with the strip till, just in terms of preparing that soil?

I use cover crop for erosion issues. I've got sandy land and we've got all the way to heavy clay, but all of my dirt will wash away during the winter rain. We started planting a cover crop in the fall. We get some weeded suppression from it, but I do it mainly for erosions. We're getting soil health benefits from it. We're getting weed suppression from it, but my thing is erosion. That's why I do it.

Yeah, we hear that a lot. Last question is what's your overall takeaway in terms of maybe something you learned, or just overall takeaway from this growing season? Especially with the breaking the yield record?

Yeah, don't give up on it because like I said, we didn't have the best stand, but we never really deviated from it. We carried it all the way again. Soybeans' lay season management is huge. I mean usually when people start giving up on beans, that's when we're really cranking up our management, at the R1 stage. As soon as flowering starts, most people are completely fertilized and everything by then. That's when we're really cranking up. A soybean plant will take up about 67% of its fertility after R1, so that's when we really start hammering. We're laying in PGRs, foliar fertility, and fungicides. We're wide dropping applying nutrients banded next to the row, and then we're also injecting through the irrigation.

I remember you said you used micronutrients. Which micronutrients do you use?

All of them.

All of them. So like zinc, what are some of the other ones?

Zinc, manganese, magnesium, molybdenum, boron, copper, iron. I'm sure I'm forgetting one, but I use all of them.

Again, what are the benefits of those? I mean I talked to Caleb Trial about that one time. He just emphasized how you need the complete fertility package. What's the biggest benefits of micronutrients?

Well, I tell people it's like baking a cake. If it takes 15 ingredients to bake a cake, you can probably leave two of them out, still have a cake at the end of it, but it won't be as good as if you had all of them. The same thing with a crop. You got to have everything there and it's all got to be balanced.

I like that. That's a great analogy. I like that. Why, when and how do you desiccate the soybeans?

Why is because they're an indeterminate bean, and they'll just keep growing in our heat in the south. They don't die down on their own. We do it when we get complete pod separation from the membrane in the pod, from the bean. That's how corn, black layers, that's a black layer for soybeans is when it separates from the inside of the pod. That's when we do it.

The reason we do it, is to go ahead and desiccate those beans and get them to dry down for harvest because if not, the beans will dry down, but it'll still have green leaves and green stems. Then in our high humidity, they'll just rot because it's not a determining variety. It's an indeterminate variety.

That'll wrap things up for this week's edition of this Strip Till Farmer podcast. Thanks to Alex Harrell and Jonathan Spence for joining us today. 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 and have a great Thanksgiving. We'll see you next time.