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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Montag Mfg., James Crouch, national segment manager for Yokohama Off-Highway Tires, breaks down new technology that can help strip-tillers minimize compaction, save fuel and boost yields.
Crouch explains the differences between radial, IF and VF tires, and why there’s a clear-cut winner when it comes to reducing compaction.
The self-proclaimed “tire nerd” also talks about the positives and negatives of central tire inflation systems (CTIS), and why original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in North America will likely start integrating them in their machines within the next 5 years.
Plus, Crouch covers how CFO (Cyclic Field Operations) ratings can allow strip-tillers to carry 55% higher loads on certain VF tires, explains the importance of tread patterns and goes over a basic maintenance checklist to use this winter when inspecting your tires.
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.
Full Transcript
Noah Newman:
Welcome to the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Montag Manufacturing. I'm your host, Noah Newman, technology editor.
Compaction is inevitable, even for strip tillers, but there are ways to alleviate it by using new technologies developed by the ag tire industry over the past decade. That's where James Crouch comes in. He's here to talk to you about the new technology, and some of the steps you can take to minimize compaction on your farm. Crouch is the national segment manager for Yokohama Off Highway Tires, and on this episode of the podcast he'll explain the differences between IF and VF tires, the positives and negatives of central tire inflation systems, what to consider when looking at tread patterns, and much, much more. Here's James.
James Crouch:
Tires are the only thing between that giant mass of equipment and the ground. Your money maker as a farmer is the dirt. That's the only thing you got. And at the end of the day, you're driving this giant hunk of machinery across it. The weights of these machines keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I have no clue where it's going to stop. Just a few weeks ago I was in northwest Iowa. We outfitted a tandem manure spreading rig for a custom applicators. They had a 60,000-pound four-wheel drive tractor pulling a 13,500-gallon tank. So you can imagine, it's 200 and some odd thousand pounds when you fill it up with manure. So you're dragging 200,000 pounds of this giant lead sled, or steel sled, across your field. And for custom applicators or farmers, you're not always able to get in the field during the perfect condition.
Sometimes you just have to go. And so, when you get out there, when it's a little bit wet, something like that, compaction really is amplified. And we know from all the university studies out there, and there's a lot of really interesting reading out there that shows that 80% of your compaction damage is done on the first pass. So that first time you touch the field with your side dresser, with whatever you're doing, your manure spreader, nitrogen toolbar, whatever it is, you're doing the majority of your damage the first time you touch it. So at the end of the day, compaction is completely inevitable at this point in agriculture and production agriculture, because your equipment is going to touch the field. Until you can George Jetson your tractor across the field, you're not going to be able to remove it. But what you can do through tires is minimize it.
You can minimize it using the technology that the tire industry has been able to adopt over the past decade, 15 years, to help maximize the size of your footprint. And at the end of the day, the bigger the footprint you have, and the more uniform your footprint, the lower your soil compaction, because it's all based on weight divided by square inches. That's it. It's just simple math.
So, with tire technology, sometimes you're not... Well, let me back up. So at the end of the day, if you're just looking at footprint, right? If you want the biggest footprint possible to reduce your compaction, then you would go, "Okay, I just need the biggest tire possible." Well, you can't always do that, right? With strip till, no-till, vertical tillage, with all this stuff, sometimes you need to stay out of the row, sometimes you want to stay out of the row for minimizing double damage impacts, or just with the way your field's laid out, or there's a bunch of other variables.
So with that, sometimes you're locked into a specific tire size or tire width. For example, if you're buying a new, big high horsepower frontal [inaudible 00:03:21] these days, most likely the rear tires on it are going to be a 480-80-R50. So it's 480 millimeters wide. You got duals on it, so you'll be 960 millimeters wide of tire actually, tire width on each side of the tracker, on the back. And those tires are about 76 to 80 inches tall, somewhere in that ballpark. Man, you're restricted to that, because that width is pretty traditional in North America, or at least in the US, and it keeps you out of the row for 30-inch row spacing. But what you can do, so with the standard radial tire, you're able to minimize the compaction with the standard radial versus an old school bias.
So there's a lot of people that still run bias, but the problem with the bias tire is that your footprint is not very uniform. Your footprint is a little bit smaller because of the construction of the tire. So that's where the radials came in. With radials, the deflection actually happens in the sidewall, instead of deforming the tread face when you load the tire up. When you load up a bias, and when I say load up I mean put weight on it, the footprint actually deforms a little bit. So you don't get a nice, uniform footprint patch, you don't get that big square that we like to see on the footprint. You get a little bit more like a donut. So it really just kind of distorts and it does not evenly spread that weight out across the footprint. With a radial tire, which was the next step in tire technology, when the tire loads up, when you put weight on the tire, the sidewall flexes, the tire gets a little bit shorter, and the footprint gets longer.
And with that longer footprint, you have more rubber on the ground and you're spreading your weight over a larger area. The next step in tire technology was low pressure technology. With Alliance, we call it agroflex technology. With agroflex technology, it's a universal standard. So us, our competitors, everybody's running off the same pressure tables, the same technology, the same concept. You'll see two different designations, or multiple different, but I'll talk about two different designations on the tire. You'll see IF, which it'll be right in front of the size of the tire. So you'll see an IF, for example, 480/80/R50, or dash R50, or you'll see VF. So VF 480-80-R50. What those two things do is they allow your tire to run at a lower pressure and carry the same weight as a radial tire. Or it can carry more weight at the same pressure as a radial tire.
So, if you think about it from the terms of compaction, with an IF tire, IF stands for increased flexion. Flexion is the ability of the tire to flex, to squat. It gives you that nice little bulge on the bottom that we like to see that a lot of people think means flat. It's not. But with an increased flexion tire, with an IF tire, there's a 20% variable. 20% bonus, if you will. So the tire can either run at 20% lower pressure and carry the same load as a standard radial tire. Or it can carry 20% more weight at the same pressure as a radial tire standard radial tire. What that does is, let's say you're running 20 PSI in a standard radial tire, now all of a sudden you're able to run, what would that be, 16. So you drop 4 PSI. And there's a lot of different schools of thought as far as what pressure translates to as far as compaction.
I would say that, I'm not going to quote any of them, because soil types are so different. I mean your soil type from one corner of your field to the other, it could be vastly different. Especially in areas like the southeast, the West Coast. Midwest is a little more uniform, but you still have sandy spots, you have lighter spots. It's not perfectly sandy long all the way across the field. So all we know for certain is that a lower pressure is better. So that's what I stand behind. What it means, I don't know. I don't know if it's going to reduce your footprint or reduce your pressure by 10 PSI or 2. All I know is it reduces your pressure on the ground.
With VF technology, which is very high flexion, so it's the next step, it's a 40% bonus. So now instead of that 20% bump, you get a 40% bump. So if you're running a VF 480-80-R50, instead of running 20 PSI that standard radial, or 16 PSI in that IF, now you're down to about 12. So it really cuts the pressure down and the tire can carry the same weight, same speeds, same everything, as a standard radial tire. Again, dramatically reduces your compaction. And what reduce compaction does, at the end of the day? There's a lot of research out there that shows that the damage to your yield can be anywhere from 2% to 60% when it comes to what impact compaction has on yield. So again, it goes back to your seed type, your planning philosophy, your soil type, all this other stuff, rainfall, whatever it may be. But again, lower pressure is better. So, in VF tires, that's what Alliance has adopted across the board.
So with us, we have what we call, we've kind of wrapped it up and put a bow on it, we have our whole farm concept. So the whole farm concept that Alliance or at Yokohama, depending on how you want to label this, the whole farm concept is, we know as a company, we know as the product manager staff, the OE people talking to the leaders on the forefront of ag technology, we know that reducing compaction is the only way to feed the world, right? I mean, the world's population is increasing dramatically. I've got a chart that shows this, that shows the global population versus food supply. And there is a point, you can argue when this point is because population growth and decline is a cyclical thing, but there's a point when that crosses, when food supply and population growth cross. And at that point, where it crosses, there's not enough food to feed the planet.
So, the only way that tire people know that we can help impact that is reducing compaction. See, people have a whole different job to do, equipment, people have a different job to do. The farmers have a different job to do, but what tire people can do is help reduce compaction to increase yield. So that's where our agroflex technology comes into play.
We have a low pressure tire for pretty much every single thing that touches the farms. And we're the only company that can say that. We have low pressure tires for combines, implements, floaters, manure tanks, you name it, sprayers. We have a low pressure tire, most likely a VF tire for everything. What we've adopted is that we know IF, increased flexion, is an improvement over standard radio, but VF is the best thing out there right now. So IF for us is a stepping stone. That's our learning curve.
So everything we're launching now, I'm responsible for requesting new products and launching those products in the North American market. I don't ask for IF tires anymore. I ask for VF only. If we can't do VF, we figure it out until we can. We work on it until we can get there, because it is the best solution.
So that's where we're at. That's how Yokohama can help the farmer make more money at the end of the day, help make more money by reducing compaction, by reducing air pressure, by adopting new tire technology, is the agroflex whole farm concept, we can put a low pressure tire on everything on the farm, and increase yield by reducing compaction.
Noah Newman:
Wow. It sounds like the VF tire technology, and you've been in the business for a long time as we were talking about, how significant of a development was when you started to see the VF tire technology? It sounds like that's one of the biggest developments you've probably seen in your career, right?
James Crouch:
It's the biggest thing since the radial, right? I mean, because it's really a different design of the tire. It's not just that we drop the pressure and said you're good to go and then cross our fingers. The tire is designed completely differently. The sidewalls are different, they're designed to flex a little bit more. The shoulders are a little bit lighter, with a little more... Well, we move the rubber around and the shoulder to allow that flexion to really get down there and drop that pressure down. But at the same time, we have to maintain the ability to carry these massive loads. I mean, if you've ever seen a DB120 John Deere planter when it's holding up in transport, that thing is crazy heavy. And then you put saddle tanks with your audience with strip-till, no-till, you've got people running saddle tanks, and nose tanks, and all this. The weight is enormous.
So not only are we trying to reduce compaction by reducing the air pressure of the tire, but we have to skyrocket the capacity and make sure we maintain the tire durability and integrity so it can carry these massive loads, because at the end of the day, a flat tire does nobody any good. So we got to make sure that tire holds air, we got to make sure it runs at the lowest pressure possible to maximize the yield. But yeah, VF technology, that is the best out there right now. The only other thing that I would throw on top of that, the cherry on top, is I would say, right now VF is the best thing the industry has. So what's next? We're not just sitting on our hands. We're not just sitting back twiddling our thumbs waiting on VF to take over the world. There's got to be something else.
So what are we trying to push to? And I'm not prepared to dive too deep into what the next designation is going to be, but I will say something to consider, something for your farmers to consider, your readers to consider, is tire inflation systems. So central tire inflation systems, right now, I know most farmers are skeptical of them, and I would be too. They add a lot of mechanisms to the machine. Some of the aftermarket solutions aren't very attractive. Aesthetically, they have lines hanging out over the tires. They're a little more complicated to get established on a dual setup than a single like in Europe. OEMs in Europe are already adopting this, which tells you that it's just a matter of time before it trickles over here. But what central inflation systems do, or CTIS, as the industry calls it, is it allows that tire to run at the exact correct pressure all the time. Whether it's a standard radial, an eye for a VF.
So this is really the best case scenario, because when a tire nerd like me is setting up a tire on a new tractor, so one of the things we like to do, Yokohama set up to do it, we'll send our field reps out to a farmer, and they all have drive over DOT, or not all of them, but a lot of them have drive over DOT scales in their vehicles. They'll get those scales, they'll weigh the tractor in the worst case scenario. So let's say, for example, a tractor that's pulling the planter. Or a big no-till drill, or whatever it may be, or air seater. We'll weigh that tractor, we'll put the steel under the tires at the heaviest position possible. Max fuel, max hydraulic fluid, hopefully. And then if the implement has a transport mode, normally that's when the most load is on the back of the axle of the tractor.
So we'll fold that clan up, we'll lift that tillage tool up, we'll fill the grain cart up, whatever it may be, just to get the worst case scenario. We want to really understand what the worst day in the life of that tire is going to be. And that's what we set the pressure to. So the way that tire pressure goes is you have a specific load capacity equals to a specific air pressure at a specific speed, and that's what that tire's built to. So what you have to set, or what you're forced to set up a tractor to do, is carry, you have to set the pressure for the maximum load that the tire's going to see at the maximum sustained speed. So tractors today fly, I mean, these are F1 cars at 60,000 pounds. So you're setting your pressure for a 32-mile an hour rig, or a 40-mile an hour rig at the maximum load capacity that's needed.
So when you get to the field though, so think about this, you get to the field, you start to fold that giant implement out, all of a sudden the weight comes off the drawbar. A lot of it. Whether it's a planter, or tillage, whatever, a lot of that weight comes off the drawbar. Now, all of a sudden you're overinflated on the back. And an overinflated tire is a bad thing for compaction, because your footprint's smaller than what we designed the tire to be, because we've had to overinflate the tire to compensate for the worst case scenario. So what you can do to counter that is with a central tire inflation system. There's a lot of aftermarket systems out there already. There's a little box in the cab. It's got field and road. You click the button for field, it'll air your tires up to where it needs to go for the field, which is preset by the end user, or the manufacturer of the system.
When you get to the field and you're folding your implement out, it takes a couple of minutes to do. You hit the field button, bam, it drops your air pressure down to your field speed and field load. Now you're optimized. So, instead of having your tire set for 32 miles an hour, or 30 miles an hour, your tires are responding to what the tire pressure needs to be at six miles an hour, or eight miles an hour, or 11 miles an hour, at the load of your implement being towed instead of being in transport mode with all that weight on the drawbar.
So, if you're really looking for best case scenario, and I know it's not realistic for everybody, but if you're looking for best case scenario, if you came to me and said, "Minimize compaction on my farm as much as you can as a tire nerd," what I would do is go with a VF tire and install a central inflation system and set the pressures that way. That way you're absolutely minimizing your compaction as much as possible by running the correct air pressure a hundred percent of the time. That's the best way.
Noah Newman:
And let's burn a quick time out. Here's 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 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 tail implements. For more information, visit the Montag website, or contact your Montag dealer." Now, back to the conversation.
The central inflation system, so would you say, I know you don't have a crystal ball or anything, but five to 10 years from now, would you say that's going to be a pretty common thing that a lot of farmers are using?
James Crouch:
A hundred percent. We're both talking from the perspective of compaction, reducing compaction. And big ideas like this, the aftermarket, it'll plant the seed, and the aftermarket will vet the technology. But at the end of the day, me and you both know the people that are going to really sell this thing, and farmers all of a sudden are going to think it's a good idea, is when OEMs pump it out into the market, when they integrate it into their machine, their platform, to where it does look good, where it does function seamlessly. So the green guys, the red guys, the blue guys, the green guys with the white tops, they're all going to be the ones that really adopt this and send this out to the market. And they're already getting there. So Fent, for example, in Europe, they have a system, Claws already has a system that they run in Europe on their shoppers, I know, maybe their tractors as well. I think [inaudible 00:18:11] and Tractor has one.
So it's out there. Five to 10 years from now, I think compaction will be number one, will be one of the items that they see as a benefit. The second thing that they'll see as a benefit is efficiency. So when you're looking to maximize fuel efficiency, whether it's diesel fuel, or in the future you're looking at electricity and you're looking at maximizing your kilowatt-hours, or kilowatts per hour use, you need to minimize your slip. So slip being, if you think about it in the mathematic terms, and I am no math guy, but for every one rotation of your tire, in a perfect world, you want that tractor to move one rotation's worth of distance. That's 100% efficiency. Now, nobody runs that way. Slip, you actually want your tractor to slip a little bit. That's the way the transmissions are set up. You want a couple percentages slip.
But the way you minimize slip is you give it the biggest footprint you can. So put as much rubber on the ground as you can to really bite down into that soil. And when your tire's overinflated, you're going to slip more than you would be if your tire was perfectly inflated through a CTIS system. What that does, any kind of slip, any reduction of one-to-one slip versus travel is a reduction in economy, in energy economy, or energy efficiency. So for an equipment manufacturer, look, these machines are huge. Four-wheel drive now, a big four-wheel drive, you're burning 24, 26 gallons of diesel fuel in an hour. And I guarantee you that is not going to reduce, or not going to get cheaper in the future. That cost is going to increase. That cost of operation will continue to increase. So to maximize that and maximize your efficiency, you've got to make sure that you're minimizing your slip to maximize your energy efficiency. So with a CTIS system, you get closer to doing that.
Noah Newman:
What would be the one thing standing in the way of more farmers using the CTIS system? It seems like something that everyone would want to use, but right now, what would you say is the biggest... We see this with when we talk about precision, technology, certain barriers or obstacles that are standing in the way of farmers, more farmers from adopting it. So what would you say, in terms of CTIS, why more people aren't using it right now?
James Crouch:
Oh, I mean, the biggest barrier obviously is going to be cost. Of any technology, right? Not just CTIS, but even VF tires are more expensive than standard radial tires. Standard radial tires are more expensive than bias tires. The ladder goes on. But CTIS, or VF tires, the biggest downside is the cost. It's more expensive to get into it. For tires, it's not as expensive as it used to be. We've tried to keep as competitive as possible versus the radial tires just to encourage adoption. For CTIS, it's a 20 or $30,000 option sometimes. It's not cheap. But, I would encourage, just like anything else when it comes to precision, or any kind of data service, you put a pencil to paper. And even if you low ball, let's say there were some studies done not too long ago where reducing compaction and adopting VF technology on a farm can increase your yield by like six to 7%.
So six to 7% yield increase is huge. And let's say we're half wrong. Let's say we're completely half wrong and the tire industry has screwed it up 50%. Even a 3% bump in yield is huge. When it comes to a farmer that's farming a thousand acres, you pencil that out and what you're 3%, let's say we're half wrong, a 3% increase in yield multiplied by your yield from a year in a certain field, you're paying off that CTIS system pretty quickly. Or you're paying off that tire pretty quickly. So the ROI is quick. Once you really sit down and think about it and work the numbers, it's not going to blurt out the value itself. And you're probably not going to listen to a sales guy, I understand that, but if you do the math yourself, sit down and think about it, ROI is really short.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, it sounds like a great ROI there. So, if there's a farmer right now who maybe they have a tight budget, do you have any tips or things you can do maybe maintenance wise to help cut back on that compaction?
James Crouch:
Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing, just for tires in general, tires are always something that... Nobody likes changing tires. Nobody likes buying tires. Nobody. It's not a fun thing, it's not a cheap thing. It's never convenient. I'll be the first person to admit that. The first thing you can do as a farmer, let's say it's this time of year, or a month from now, I live in Texas, so it's nice and warm, but the majority of the farming country in the US or Canada, they're iced over right now, or there will be shortly. Get out in your barn, look at your tires, just look at them. If you've got duals, it's not easy to see the inside tire.
But get a flashlight, get a creeper, get down there, and look at the tire to make sure you don't have cracks. Make sure you don't have any leaks, because especially with duals, and I'll say this as a North American problem more than a European problem, if one of those tires is higher inflated than the other, you're overloading the other tire, because a tire with more inflation pressure than the tire next to it is taller. So you're putting stress on another tire that's not necessarily needed.
Make sure your pressures are uniform, make sure you don't have cracks. Make sure you don't have any obstacles, or what am I trying to say, any objects logged in the tires. It's not uncommon to see bolts, deer antlers, stubble in some cases. All that stuff. Because at the end of the day, if you've got time to do it now, do it. Because you don't want do that when you're prepping your planter in spring and all of a sudden you need a tire, you call your tire guy and he's two weeks out. So that's a nightmare scenario. Do it now. Just take a look. Check your air pressures quick. It takes five minutes, 10 minutes.
And then contact your dealer. Contact your tire dealer. Your tire dealers know how to get in touch with us, especially with Yokohama, we've got a ton of brick and mortar distribution out there. They know how to get in touch with me. They know how to get in touch with our sales reps. Our sales reps know how to get in touch with me. We can do the math. We can sit down, run the numbers, give you at least a ballpark idea of where your pressures need to be. Because at the end of the day, our best guess, and this is from 15 years of industry knowledge, over 75% of tires out there on tractors are overinflated, because people don't want to see that bulge. They don't want to see any kind of bulge or deformity in the bottom of the tire, but it's supposed to be there. So give us a chance to help set your air pressure. It'll ride better, it'll reduce your compassion, it'll reduce slip, it'll increase your yield, and it'll increase your fuel economy.
Noah Newman:
Now, another thing I wanted to ask you about was CFO ratings on combine and sprayer tires. What can you tell us about that in terms of, I've been told that they could allow farmers to carry, what, 55% higher loads on certain VF tires?
James Crouch:
So there's a couple tricks there. This is the new one. So CFO's only been out for, I don't know, eight, 10 years. So CFO, in the traditional form, it stands for Cyclic Field Operation. So cyclic field operation is a load bonus placed on an IF or a VF tire. And it differs for IF and VF. But what cyclic means, in the traditional sense is, think about it for a combine or a grain cart. Or I'm sorry, think about it for a combine. Just for a combine, because that's where it initiated. As you're moving through the field, is that combine's moving through the field, it's taking on grain or taking on product. So the weight is increasing quite a bit. So there's a bonus at specific speeds for that increase in product and increase in mass as it moves across the field. And then it offloads into a grain carton, off you go again.
That varies for IF and VF. Look at the manufacturer's website, contact your dealer to get the specifics on it. It is uniform, it's a standard across the industry. So everybody says the same. CFO means the same to Yokohama as it does for Firestone. But contact your dealer for the best numbers.
Now, for sprayers, there is a sprayer CFO designation as well. But like you mentioned earlier, CFO normally is a 55% load bonus when you're in a cyclic operation. With sprayers, there's a CFO designation as well, but it's different. And that's where it gets tricky. And I'm hoping that the industry can help clarify this so people don't have misconceptions about what their sprayer can handle. The sprayer CFO is a 13.5% bonus when it's in the field, and I can't remember the speed off the top of my head, so talk to your dealer, look up your manufacturer's data book.
But a sprayer cyclic is almost the opposite of what you would think a harvester would be. So think about the condition you're going to the field. So when you start your work for the day in a combine, your hopper's empty most likely, you take off and you're increasing the mass as it goes through the field. With the sprayer is the opposite. You hit the field, you've got 1600 gallons of liquid added in your tank, you take off across the field and your mass reduces. So it's the complete opposite. And that's why the bonus load is different. The bonus load is 13.5% versus the 55 or the 38% that you get with hyper VF CFO. So it's a little bit different.
Make sure you understand that before you get your air pressure recommendation for your sprayer target CFO. We offer CFO sprayer tires, so does some of the competition, but just understand that you really need to ask your dealer, contact your manufacturer to get the right pressures before you go to the field.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, definitely. Good advice there. And then I know you kind of touched on this earlier, but tread patterns. What kind of new tread patterns are out there, and how important are tread patterns when looking to reduce compaction?
James Crouch:
Sure, there's some cool stuff out there. I mean, at the end of the day, when you're talking about reducing compaction, tread pattern does make a difference, because a lot of your compaction is not... Well, your compaction, some of your compaction is done by the logs. The rest of your compaction, or other compaction is actually done by the casing itself. So as your tire sanctions to the ground, the casing applies pressure to the ground. You have what's called a pinch in between. So the material in between the logs compresses a little bit. You have a lot of stuff like that. So tread pattern does make a difference. I would say the biggest difference with tread pattern that you really want to pay attention to is the ability to reduce slip, because slip does increase compaction as well. As you're churning that tire around, you're really putting a lot of pressure on the soil.
With Yokohama, we offer several different patterns. We offer in our agroflex portfolio, we offer the 354, which is like a 37-degree tread bar. We think that's a really good happy medium between forward traction and lateral traction. For our bigger tires, like for combine tires, we offer a 45-degree tread bar, which is we think is optimal for lateral and forward traction. And then for sprayers, we have the traditional 37-degree log. We also have a pattern called the 363. And with the 363, not only is it a VF tire, so it's running those low pressures, but it's the best of both worlds in my feeble-minded opinion, just because if you think about it. If you're really looking to maximize traction, and minimize slip, and maximize controllability on the road as well, because sprayers are their cars half the time and tractors half the time, the log that you need, I'll challenge you with this. What is the perfect tread pattern for forward traction on a tire in the field? It's zero degree.
Noah Newman:
Oh, zero. Okay.
James Crouch:
A tank track or a track track that you see down on big tractors. It's a zero degree tread bar. It's completely lateral, it's horizontal. Versus where you're trying to go, that gives you perfect forward traction. The downside to that is it gives you no lateral traction. So your side to side traction is very poor. So, conversely, if you're thinking what's the best tread design, for lateral traction, your zero degree the other way vertically. Well, the 363, because that maximizes, think about an old rib steer on the front of a two-wheel drive tractor. The ribs were vertical. They were vertical or perpendicular to the operator, perpendicular to the direction of travel. So it gives you the maximum lateral traction. Specifically when you're talking about a sprayer, which is where the 363 pattern originated, the value in a sprayer anymore is not only being able to dump out a whole bunch of fertilizer or whatever it may be as quickly as possible, but also your precision.
You're talking to a precision audience. The straighter that sprayer is, the better your ROI is, the more precise your application the chemicals are. The more effective you're going to be. So with the 363 pattern, what it does is it blends that forward traction and it blends the lateral traction to be able to maximize your controllability and sustainability in the field. So now, not only do you have, if you look at the 363 tread pattern, it's got a broken block on the shoulder that's like a 37-degree tread bar, but it also has a center rib that's broken like an old rib steer. And it allows that tire to stick in the ground and run on a railroad track, while still performing the forward traction it needs. So you minimize your slip, you minimize your compassion. Not only is it a VF tire, but you're able to minimize your slip on that tire because of the special tread pattern.
That's a blend of a traditional block log that you see in an R4 backhoe tire, and the tractor tire. At the end of the day, the tractor tire pattern, the old school Chevron tread pattern, is a hundred years old. So my uncle's, John Deere 5020 had BF Goodrich tires on the back of the bias 18 438 duals. That was a 1972 model tractor, and there were bar logs. They were the same log design that you would see 95% of the people running today. The difference is that tractor never ever hit asphalt. Ever. It was always on the farm. If you look at tractors today, tractors today are not native to one field. They're moving a lot. The tractors that I talked about when we started talking today that I saw in northwest Iowa, this was a 460 horsepower, or no, I'm sorry, 560 horsepower, four-wheel drive.
When I got done with them, we got done with doing our pictures and talking to the farmers and everything and setting their air pressures. They had a 46-mile trek on asphalt to their next field.
Noah Newman:
Wow.
James Crouch:
My uncle's 5020 didn't do that. It wasn't supposed to do that. But where they running the same tread pattern that my uncle was, yes. Is that the perfect tread design for road? No, absolutely not. There's something else out there. There's an evolution in tread pattern coming. We think we're on the forefront of it. I understand we're not a big tier-one, innovative, or we're not seen as an innovative premium player in the market, but if you really dig through our portfolio, we're there. We've got stuff that is different and custom fit for the applications that you're seeing in North America that everybody else is ignoring. So with that different tread pattern, we've got the 363, we've got a new one coming out that'll be in the media, or it was actually shown in Agro Technica last week Navy, but it's called the 373. And it's a tractor tire that is a very similar pattern. It's got a broken outside shoulder, it's got a broken center rib to allow that traction in the field, lateral stability, as well as good roading. And it's a VF tire.
So there are different advancements there. A tractor tire doesn't always have to look like a contemporary, traditional, or I'm sorry, traditional Chevron bar log tractor tire to be effective. There is something better. There has to be. Because tractors don't do what they did a hundred years ago. They're very different.
At the end of the day, if you were to ask a tire nerd like me, best case scenario was a VF Tire with a custom fit tread pattern, or the CTIS system. You get those three things, and you're doing as good as we can possibly do as tire guys in this industry right now. We'll leave the technology and everything, we'll leave the data and all that stuff up to the tractor, and the planter, and the data system, and the cloud. But for tires, give me a tire with a special pattern at low pressure with CTIS, and that's as good as we can do today.
Noah Newman:
And that'll wrap things up for this week's Strip-Till Farmer Podcast. Big thanks to James Crouch for joining us. And big thanks to our sponsor, Montag Manufacturing, for making this podcast series possible. I'm Noah Newman. Until next time. Head to striptillfarmer.com for all things strip-till. Have a great day.
