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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, we ride along with Marlette, Mich., strip-tiller Ryan Shaw as he makes spring strips with his Environmental Tillage Systems SoilWarrior.
Ryan and his wife Melissa were recipients of the 2023 Strip-Till Innovator Award. Ryan talks about their innovative strip-till system, which includes twin rows, cover crops, homemade equipment and more!
Ryan also shares his strip-till origin story, the learning experiences along the way, and the key to maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
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The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.
Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with solutions since 1930. Today, Yetter is your answer for finding the tools and equipment you need to face today’s production agriculture demands. The Yetter lineup includes a wide range of planter attachments for different planting conditions, several equipment options for fertilizer placement, and products that meet harvest-time challenges. Yetter delivers a return on investment and equipment that meets your needs and maximizes inputs. Visit them at yetterco.com.
Full Transcript
Noah Newman:
Welcome to another edition of the Strip Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Yetter Manufacturing. I'm your host, Noah Newman, technology editor. Great to have you with us today as we ride along with Marlet Michigan Strip Tiller, Ryan Shaw, while he makes spring strips with his environmental tillage system, SoilWarrior. So, Ryan and his wife, Melissa, were recipients of the 2023 Strip Till Innovator Award and in this podcast, Ryan talks about their innovative strip till system, which includes twin rows, cover crops, homemade equipment, and much more. Ryan also shares his strip till origin story, some of the learning experiences along the way, and the key to maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
Ryan Shaw:
We're making strips, freshening them up. They had fall strips last fall, onto soybean stubble and we don't normally do it, but it's going soybeans back to soybeans just because of the rotation this year. So we're just making some strips ahead of the planter, trying to stay somewhat close, so don't look like any rain coming right away, so trying to save a little bit of the moisture.
Noah Newman:
And...
Ryan Shaw:
We got, this is a cereal rye that we have. We used our interseeder to seed down in between our planting zones and we'll terminate it later when we spray the pre on. We try to cover all 100% of the acres, at least with the cover crops, in between our plant and zones. We had started out doing full coverage ones, but we had a little bit of trouble getting a good seed bed sometimes if it got too big, so this gives us a bigger window.
Noah Newman:
Got it.
Ryan Shaw:
And we're actually trying to make, this SoilWarrior they set up for us, is it's got a widening kit on it, so it's a little bit wider of a strip that it makes, and we're hitting it with the planter as a twin row planter, so we're planting twin row soybeans into the strip.
Noah Newman:
And about how deep do you go? Kind of give us the nuts and bolts of how your strip till system works.
Ryan Shaw:
Oh, we're trying to go about three, three to four inches deep in the spring. In the fall, we try to bury it as, five to seven, as deep as we can get with it, in hopes to make... A lot of times we hope to [inaudible 00:02:51] seed bed onto the fall strips, but this year the weather is cooperating enough to freshen them up and we're not applying anything right now, but this SoilWarrior does in the fall, will... It has two tanks on it. We'll variable rate two different products into the berm at the same time. We've used it... If we aren't using a tank or we're not applying fertilizer, sometimes we'll put oats and other... Like buckwheat. Stuff that'll terminate in the winter. Frost will kill it. We'll blow that out and put it in our berm, just to help try and hold the berm together a little bit.
Noah Newman:
What are some of your strip till truths? Like some things you've learned over the years that really helped you guys have some success out here?
Ryan Shaw:
Well, one big one with our twin row is, you can't get too aggressive with trying to get more depth out of the tiller, because the back disc on the SoilWarrior will go deeper than the front one, and that's the same slots as the seed openers go on the planter. In the front row to the tailing row of the planter, we'll get different depths and it makes it kind of tough to set up, sometimes. Really, a lot of our strip till do's and don'ts mostly came during harvest time, to know when to just hang it up for the day, if the field's too wet or you're making a mess, making tracks with a grain cart, just let those problems come back to haunt you the next spring. And so we've gotten a lot better at being patient, that if we're kind of making a mess in the fall, then we'll just stop, that it'll be a lot easier on us in the spring.
Noah Newman:
So you prefer to go in the fall, but if need be, you'll [inaudible 00:05:00] in the spring?
Ryan Shaw:
Yep. Yeah, if it's just not fit in the fall and we're just going to be kind of sliming through stuff or the soil's too wet, if we don't have to get the fertilizer down, we'll just hold off and not make any strips 'til spring. Just that we found that, you work something too wet, it's quite a commitment then the next spring to undo what you thought you were doing in the fall. Sometimes we break the field like this and he's got row shutoffs on his planter, so he likes to plant the inside passes of the headland first so that the planter will shut off. So sometimes we have to do partials just so that I don't get too far ahead of them and they don't dry out too much.
Now, this cart is a steerable cart and the tractor and the implement are both steery. So that really helps for... We have quite a few of these fields that have angle headlands and around... We got really good drainage ditches around here, so they aren't all square to the world. We actually still have oats in the SoilWarrior right now. We were applying oats last fall into the berm and it got too late. We thought we were just going to be wasting them, it was going to get too cold, so that's why there's about 3,400 pounds of oats in there. We just haven't took them out yet because sometimes in the spring, it gets hard enough here on some of our gumbo clays, we've actually bought floor dry before, and filled the hopper with a TODA floor dry, just to add more weight to it if we don't have any fertilizer in it.
Noah Newman:
So then that's Bruce over there, right? With the planter?
Ryan Shaw:
Yep. And that's a 12 row stack fold planter, the twin row, the center fill, and then he's pulling a roller right behind it, that is an ETS roller for strip till, covers three of the berms at a time and it contours to it so you don't get that bridging. It came with a cement block on it for weight, and two years ago we added that liquid tank to it, and he's pumping up the liquid fertilizer for in furrow.
Noah Newman:
And then what does your fertilizer mix look like? What's in it? How many pounds? It varies from field to field, or...
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah, it varies quite a bit, now that pop-up stuff is just.. Oh, it's just a series of like a micro pack just to help things, get a bump started and then we aren't putting any dry down with this. Most of everything for the soybeans would've gotten done last fall with the strip till.
We use mostly dry stuff when we can, and for the corn and beets, we pull a Yetter tank behind the planter and we'll put a in furrow pop-up and then we also do a two by two of the 28, some thiosol and some zinc, just to try and get it in the soil. We were fanning it out the back, behind the closing wheels before, but now we put disc on it, get it in the soil so it's in the right place and then we don't have use nearly the volumes that we were using before. You always forget to change the swath when you go from a headland to a scrape.
Noah Newman:
I see all the monitors in here. So what are you using to make strip till work? You use a lot of precision technology or...
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah, we're using... Well it's got the RTK steer in the tractor and the cart. Now we put a camera up so that we could see behind us mostly if we're going down the road, but we put another one that's down in between the rows, just so you can see, if you're blowing the row out or you're throwing the trash too far, just to get an idea of what things look like when it's in motion. You can't always... If you're going fast enough, no one can run alongside it to see what it's doing. And if you're just here by yourself, that really helps to just make sure that everything, things look like they're not boiling over or boiling out of the burn.
Now, the gauges are... One's for the row cleaner down pressure, the other one's for the wings, and then the black set is for tram lines. It has a separate set of air for the three rows that are on each side of our tram lines and behind the wheel trams. Every once in a while, we'll get into areas with our controlled traffic, that if it's a spot where the planter and the side dresser and the sprayer all happen to match up on that same path, every once in a while you'll see you do need a little bit more down pressure to make a good burn. We spent a lot of time thinking about what it was that we wanted to do. We knew we wanted to get soybeans through a seed plate, so we started with a planter and then we knew we were going to get the SoilWarrior, so we set it up, made sure we could make one planter cover all our acres at the time.
And then the ETS helped us to make sure that we were going to be able to hit twin rows on it. And then the big issue was the sugar beets, whether or not we were going to be able to go from corn stubble stalks into sugar beets and deal with all that residue. And we actually are a little different than most. With the twin row corn, we plant the following year, right over the corn stubble, and we never move our planting zone. So where we have these cover crops is actually our never-till area and we're always planting in that same planting zone. So when we do single row sugar beets, we're actually planting them in a seed bed between the twin row corn root balls.
So that took a little bit, three or four years to try and get brave enough to do it on a volume of acres. The first few years, we only tried it on a 30 here or a 40 there, just to see if we were going to be able to make it work, and each year we seemed to find something that we wanted to tweak a little more, whether it was, not dislodge the root balls, or just slice them, run the row cleaners in the fall or not. And each year, I guess you tweak it a little bit and then the weather changes its mind the next year and mother nature always wins, so we're always adjusting something.
Noah Newman:
So why strip till? Why is this a good system for where you guys farm, and what were your big motivations for starting the strip till?
Ryan Shaw:
Well, when dad and I started the farm, he was big into conservation, doing things a little bit different. He wanted to try no-till, but we were struggling a little bit with it, just because it was such that delay in that lag time to where everyone says you plant, you got to go away for two weeks and go camping. It just has a slow start. So he thought that strip till maybe would be kind of a solution to that, and the more and more we kept looking at it, we thought we could make it work. There was no one around the area to be able to really talk to, too much, about it, because it's not a real popular thing around our area. So that's when we started going out to the strip till conference, and we've met a lot of great people out there. We just end up, we go every year just to see the people that we've met along the way, and we've actually got a lot of our information and a lot of answers to our questions from the people out there that are like-minded or think the same way, that just because it's different, doesn't mean it's wrong, and it doesn't mean that the way we were doing it before was wrong, it just... We're always trying to get a little better.
Noah Newman:
So you go to the strip till conference every year, pretty much, right?
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah, about every year. I think we missed the very first one because we didn't know it was a thing, and that was the first year we bought the SoilWarrior. The next year, we ended up going out and did the training course and all that stuff, and we enjoyed it so much because we couldn't believe all the answers to our questions that we were able to get in one place, where we might have a list of questions and you could ask people around here and they were interested in it but they didn't want to give you an answer one way or the other because up here we didn't have that education yet. It was still new to the area.
Noah Newman:
So you highly recommend if there's someone getting started in strip till or even if someone has been doing it for a while, to go to the conference?
Ryan Shaw:
Yes. Yep. There's a few people that have gotten with some of the conservation [inaudible 00:15:43] programs and stuff and are interested in it, and we tell them that we're going to be going, you got to even just buy tickets for people and send people out there, that it's really something to attend, that you can get a lot of information and calm those fears of, it's not going to work or I don't want to make that... It's a big investment to switch a farm over and try to learn something new. It was a big learning curve from what we were used to doing, and more of a patience thing that, we spend a lot more time now sitting around the table deciding our crop plans, a cover crop plan, just different things that we can do, that it doesn't take us long to get out in the field and do the actual work, but we've been fine tuning where we're applying stuff, what we can get away with, what we can't, if we're going to be making strips, if we're going to plant cover crops first.
That's why we only put the cover crops between our planting zone. It opened up that window to chase the combine with the seeder and then strip it after, even if the rye already comes up, and you're not wasting that half of your cover crop seed. So it was just a few random things that we had to see first and realize, well, we can shave a few dollars off here, or we can save a little bit there. We've made it work, and it kind of all works as a system. We switched to that twin row corn and beans same year we started strip tilling, so we've had people ask us, well, does the twin row corn yield more than the single row? Our yields have went up about 10 to 15 bushel on a 10 year average, from what they were when we were conventional farming.
But technology and hybrids and everything all come into play in the system. I couldn't say that I would be right if I pointed it in one... Gave the credit to one thing or the other. I think it's it all working together. It did take a lot of planning to figure out. We knew we were only going to get equipment to a certain size and we wanted to have our control traffic and we wanted to do that 30 foot, 60 foot and 90 foot with the sprayer, and that was a little learning curve, too. Where and when can I... When I come in and spray the second time, should I move over so I'm not just always on that same one, pounding it down every year? And it seems like now we've kind of amended. At first our tram lines looked like the dirt road, that it was... You could tell where we were driving, for sure, but we knew we were making compaction but we could address it if we knew where it was at, that we didn't want it just in random spots all over.
So we are pretty careful about... Bruce runs the grain cart and we always joke that when we first got started, we would turn around in the middle of the field and he's full, he's got to go... Trucks at the other end. But he turned around in the middle of the field a couple of times and then we got playing around on, Google Earth was popular, and we could see those spots in our field and see where somebody turned around with the grain cart. And we joke now that if we see that, well, the grain cart guy got fired that year, because we joke around that you can't get away with anything, because it shows up later.
So we do fill. And if he's full and he needs to, he'll go to the headland to turn around there and then come back, the straightest shot to the truck. It seems like a small thing or someone's nitpicking, but it's just been something that we started at the beginning and it just seemed like it looks cleaner to us, that we don't see those spots where we turned around, but it's more that compaction that you were causing, where you were off of your tram lines. We did have to put a longer auger on our combine to reach the grain cart, so the grain cart could stay on a tram line.
So it was kind of that small stuff. And when we would ask some of the dealers, like, "Hey, we want to do this, we need to get a little farther out, or..." It seemed like we were asking for too much or we were being too nitpicky. We had our reason why we were looking for it. In that to most people, it wouldn't matter and it probably shouldn't matter to us, but it just was like, well, once we got used to, okay, well we got to improve a little bit here and there and... It was like we noticed those things and so we've tried to change.
We built a band sprayer, everybody around here got rid of a band sprayer, has one sitting behind the shed, but last year we built one just for... We grow cereal rye and you always have... We're saving it for seeds, so we turn the fan up, you're blowing a lot out the bag, so it ends up looking like a broadcasted rye field when we're done, and it all volunteer grows up and we didn't know what to do about it, so we ended up buying a band sprayer so we could go in and... Or build that band sprayer so we could band out and kill our planting zone so that our strip tiller could make a better seed bed for us, just because we had fought before with some solid seeded cover crops and if it got too much of a root mass, we couldn't close that seed trench real good, and the trash would almost wick and dry. It was hairpinning [inaudible 00:22:26].
So that was one curve we had to kind of overcome, was if we wanted to cover 100% of the acres with cover crops, how are we going to do it and know each field, one wasn't going to get left out with that one ended up with bad seed bed?
Noah Newman:
And let's burn a quick timeout to share a message from Yetter Farm Equipment. Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with residue management, fertilizer placement, and seed bed preparation solutions, since 1930. Today, Yetter is your answer for success in the face of ever-changing production agriculture challenges. Yetter offers a full lineup of planter attachments designed to perform in varying planting conditions, multiple options for precision fertilizer placement, strip till units, and stalk rollers for your combine. Yetter products, maximize your inputs, save you time, and deliver return on your investment. Visit them at yetterco.com. That's Y-E-T-T-E-R-C-O.com. Now back to the podcast.
So yeah, explain your cover crop system. How do you apply them? When do you apply them, what species you're using, just kind of the details of that, your cover crop usage.
Ryan Shaw:
We use... The majority of stuff, we started... Dad liked to flirt around and stuff. He did radishes and oats and stuff like that, but now we use basically cereal rye in the fall for everything and we'll cover all the acres with the cereal rye out of the planting zone. Now we then will strip our planting zone in the fall and a lot of times it'll have oats and buckwheat in it. And that all goes through an interseeder that we built.
Noah Newman:
Oh, you built your own interseeder?
Ryan Shaw:
Yep. Yeah, we built our own interseeder and everybody said, "Why would you build an interseeder that's so nice, just to interseed your corn... And all the ups and downs of the interseeding of the corn?" And we said, "Well, no, basically we built it to do what this is, out here, with the seeding outside of our planning zone. It was more a benefit that we were able to use it and interseed our standing corn. That interseed mix is usually about a seven to eight way mix of, we've done clovers and hairy vetch and grape seed and buckwheat, annual rye, a little bit of everything, some winter peas, and just kind of trying different things. We usually try to do three years in a row of the same mix to roll out environmental, and we've kind of now settled in on a blend, but every once in a while, we're adjusting the pounds of each one that we put in, just depending on what we see thrives in the fall after harvest, because we're not really going for trying to bump a yield in the corn or feed that corn anything. We just want something there covering the ground because corn harvest gets late and we're just so cold then, it's hard to get something started and cover the ground for the winter time.
Noah Newman:
What are the best benefits of cover crops?
Ryan Shaw:
Oh, man.
Noah Newman:
A lot of them?
Ryan Shaw:
Yes. We just love them to... You can suppress a lot of weeds if it's done right, and that's one thing we... If you're going to use cover crops, you got to have a reason why you're using them. It's not just a trend thing. We use it a lot for suppressing weeds. Like this bean field will get sprayed with a pre, but we won't terminate this rye. We'll let it grow up and when I spray my liberty pass, it'll bleach it out, it won't kill it. The second liberty pass will pretty much knock it out from putting any seeds in the head, but that stuff will be standing up quite tall, and when it lays down, it helps hold a lot of our weeds down, and with us not moving our planting zone, that never-till area, we seem to have suppressed a lot of the weeds out of that area.
I don't know if the seeds are still in that bank, and if we were ever to till that area up, if we'd have a lot of weeds or not, but we've been trying to use less herbicides and use it to kind of conquer that. The interseeding into the corn is, we'll spray it free and burn the rye down, that's the cover that's there, and we will never go back in and spray again. We usually wait until we can interseed it, and then let that choke everything out, and kind of shade the ground. And one strange thing we found about the interseeding is, if you have any patches out in that corn field that drown it out or don't look good or the corn's thin, the cover crops will thrive in that area and they'll keep all the weeds out. When you go through the combine, you don't come across that drowned out area and it's not just a big patch of weeds. And then you might know, well, that's where you got to take a load of dirt and fill in the low spot or that's where I needed to have a surface ditch.
Noah Newman:
So weed control is the biggest benefit, yeah?
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah.
Noah Newman:
That's a big one.
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah, and then trying to keep our soil covered. We do get that there's a series of those wind farms around here, we get our fair share of wind, and just trying to keep the soil we have, protected enough to keep it on our own field... It keeps our soil active. I think it's helping build... It's not a quick thing to build organic matter, but every little bit of the biomass you're putting back down in there, helps, and you only get so many farming seasons, so we figure we better keep up with it, otherwise we might not get to see those benefits, but we're hoping to pass the farm on to our kids when we have some, that it... Kind of paying it forward, I think.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. It sounds like your dad was always kind of conservation-minded, though.
Ryan Shaw:
Yes. Yep.
Noah Newman:
He kind of instilled that in you?
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah, he definitely helped set us up for success, so that's kind of bled onto us, that we got to leave this ground better than we found it, and dad did a pretty good job, where it was pretty good when we got it, that we got our work ahead of us if we want to leave it for the next generation, that it's... We've been blessed, we call it God's country here. We're in this just right area. We're just far enough away from the lake and just close enough, too.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, it's a great area to be in.
Ryan Shaw:
Yep.
Noah Newman:
So were you on the farm your whole life or did you leave at any point, go to school or anything?
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah, I started working with dad and his brothers on the big farm and then I graduated high school and it was one of those things where it wasn't a real option. I had to at least go to school, is what my mom told me, and try it out, and I went for a year and it just wasn't for me.
I enjoyed it, the education was good, but getting a job and being inside in the city, it just wasn't for me-
Noah Newman:
Sitting at a desk all day long.
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah. I needed to be outside. So I talked it over with dad and he told me I could come home and... So I started farming with him and we farmed a year and a half, or I did with the big farm full time, and then dad decided, yep, this is what you want to do, and it was quite a big farm, there was 13 of us grandkids, we mutually agreed on, we separated from them and started our own farm, and that opened up the opportunity for my other cousins to take over that farm, and it was a good thing and we worked our way up. We had about 800 acres and now we're just over 1400.
So we doubled in size and it was plenty enough to keep us busy with only three of us. We ended up... Dad passed away last February...
Noah Newman:
Sorry to hear that.
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah, it was for the better. He was... Never got sick, never in the hospital, got that early onset Alzheimer's at 56 and he got 10 good years out of it afterwards, and what he had said, we were close and stuff, we worked together every day and he said, "It's going to be your problem, it's time I pay mom back for all the years I had a farming habit," and they went and enjoyed stuff.
But he was ecstatic that we were taking this to the next step, that after the first 10 years that we were on our own, that we started strip tilling, and he was ecstatic to come to the fields and see that everything he had thought about doing and accomplishing, we were making happen. And he was just ecstatic about it.
Noah Newman:
He's got to be really proud of you, I bet.
Ryan Shaw:
Yep. He got to be here for some of the learning curve and the struggles and he'd seen that. It was just too bad that he didn't get to see it firsthand now where now it's the rewarding part. We're seeing the changes... After about five years was when we've seen the soil started to do something and it was like we were revived it, we woke it back up and it started paying us back for the way we were treating it, and it was like that reward that, hey, this is working, we can stick with this, because it was a nerve-wracking thing, that first year and, is this going to work? Is stuff going to grow? You always have that fear, everybody's watching and they want to learn something, too. And it was like, just don't let us fall on our face.
Noah Newman:
And you stuck with it.
Ryan Shaw:
Yep. And then we're really happy we did. It brought... It's not that farming wasn't fun before, but it seemed the same type of... We were always doing the same stuff. This brought a lot of excitement to it, or what can we do different or what can we change? And it just brought a whole new meaning to the way we did it.
Noah Newman:
That's why you're the innovator of the year. You're always looking for new ways to do stuff, it seems like. Building your own interseeder, that's pretty innovative.
Ryan Shaw:
We love to learn. And there's so much that we haven't learned, that... And we go to all these meetings and stuff and it's just like, when we leave, the ride home is just like... It isn't quiet at all. It's like, "Well, I talked to this person and we learned this and..." We're constantly learning from other people, what we can add to our system that somebody else has done also and like, "Hey, we could make that fit. Maybe we got to just adjust this or that." It has really made it fun. And if you're going to do something for a living, it should be fun. Dad had said when we split off, he said, "We're going to farm if we're going to have fun doing it. If we don't, we better find something else to do."
Noah Newman:
You spend a lot of your life working, you might as well enjoy work.
Ryan Shaw:
Yep. Well, there's just three of us. Melissa, my wife, and I and my neighbor, Bruce. And Bruce is like family to us. He runs the planter and he's like our major operator. We feed him seed, chemical, fertilizer, all that. He does a lot of the... He's like a shop manager. He can tell us what he knows the planter needs, and a lot of times, Melissa and I'll organize the parts or making sure the chemicals are at the farm or the fertilizer's delivered on time. Melissa does all of our nutrient management. With the strip till, it threw some people off with how we wanted the soil test. So she thought it'd maybe be better if we did it ourselves. And she has a whole system for how she pulls her samples and puts them all together, some from in the berm, some from out of the berm.
And then she works with a guy and they make recommendations. So she makes all of our prescriptions, loads them in for us. And then she does a lot of the scouting for me, for even the pest management. And then I run the sprayer, usually run the SoilWarrior in the spring, jumping in and out of it and then jump into the sprayer to throw the pres on. And then we'll usually go into side dressing and interseeding and band spraying. And usually Bruce does most all that. It's good because that's the heat of the year. As long as the air conditioner keeps working for him, we just keep them going. And then when it comes time for harvest, I usually run the combine. Bruce will run the green cart. We may do it a little different, this fall. I think I've convinced Melissa that she can run the combine and then I'll run the dryer, but she's been actually running the dryer for us and she does a really good job. She's patient enough to wait for the cooling fans to finish, where sometimes if it's me, "Oh, it's ran for 15, 20 minutes, that's good. It doesn't need to run 45 minutes," and I drop. So she keeps us honest.
She's the one, she runs the topper in the sugar beets and I run the harvester and Bruce runs the chain cart for loading the trucks and usually Melissa, being in the top or... If it starts raining, she can just stop topping and she makes that decision, it's time to stop. You can't harvest beets that aren't topped. So she keeps us honest out there and keeps us from mudding up a field or just plain making a mess, where sometimes my old mentality is, well, we're all here, we should get something done, even... It'll quit raining. It'll stop in 10 minutes. And she's usually the wise one that tells us, "Let's just try again tomorrow."
So with only three of us here, it's a lot of work, but we all work really well together and we all have worked together long enough. We know what we expect out of each other and what needs to be done and what doesn't. And there's those times where we've realized family and stuff matters too. And there's days in the summer where if what we're doing isn't that important or doesn't need to be done right then, if Bruce has grandkids, have baseball games and stuff, that stuff needs to happen, too. And so we work really hard, but we like to play, too. We like to play hard, too.
It's one of those things. With what happened to dad, where he worked so hard his whole life, never got retirement, it was like, you know what? That can happen too much too, often, that there's no reason we can't be a joy in life along with what we're doing. And with only three of us here, it does make it kind of nice because we can make our own rules.
Noah Newman:
You're your own boss.
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah.
And Wes Bruce, he's the oldest of all of us...
Noah Newman:
How old is we?
Ryan Shaw:
He was the same age as dad. He's 67 now.
Noah Newman:
Oh, okay.
Ryan Shaw:
So he's getting close to retirement and I tell him, "You're my operator. When you want to go home, you make the rules, and I don't want your wife mad at me." And he does such a great job that he enjoys... You can tell he enjoys doing what he's doing, too, but I told him, "I'm going to need you around, even if it's just in the office or you're telling somebody else to..." Because it'll probably take two or three people to fill his position when he's gone.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, he sounds like a beast a lot.
Ryan Shaw:
Yep.
Noah Newman:
[inaudible 00:40:52].
Ryan Shaw:
He does a lot. With him running the planter in the fall, when he runs the strip tiller, he knows where he wants to go and how he wants to make the strips, because he knows he has to follow those the next spring, with the planter. So it works really good because he isn't making strips that we could never hit with the planter, whether it's a real sharp curve or tight up against telephone poles, stuff like that, that he understands what we're looking for, he knows how many swathes are in a field ,so he doesn't end up in the back far corner, and he ends up close to the driveway so he's not driving over the berms and... Those small things that when we first started strip tilling, we didn't realize that until you finish the field, then you're in the back corner, "How do I get out of here without driving on these now?"
Noah Newman:
I wouldn't have thought of that.
Ryan Shaw:
We learned where we wanted driveways at, in some of the fields, so that it was easier to get into and get lined up. Sometimes when we think about it, it seems like it's been 20 years, and it's only 10 that we've been trying this stuff. But it-
Noah Newman:
Not a long time, really.
Ryan Shaw:
No. It just seems like we've come so far because we enjoy it so much that we keep learning something new every year and then we think back and it's like, "Oh, remember when we did..." And it's like, "Oh yeah, that was only five years ago."
Noah Newman:
It feels like forever. Yeah. So I'm trying to get an idea for what your calendar or your schedule looks like. So just take us through, on a month-by-month or season-by-season, what you do in terms of when you're planting crops, that kind of stuff. What is your schedule? So, starting in January, you doing anything in the winter, or...
Ryan Shaw:
No. In January, we usually... Well, we usually are hauling corn in January. We'll haul corn in January, February, and work in the shop. We're usually done fixing all the stuff that broke during sugar beet season by then, and usually have the planters and working on them, making sure they're all ready and fit. We'll haul corn in February and then March is usually delivery month. Sugar beet seeds start showing up, things get a lot more active, fertilizers start getting delivered. And on a rare occasion, I only remember once that we planted sugar beets in March. Usually they're in April.
We'll get the sugar beets in and then it usually swaps over and we'd get right into soybeans and we'll put 300 acres of soybeans in, or so, and then usually swap over and start doing corn and then go back to the soybeans and usually finish them. But we're usually trying to hit all the pres and all of the spraying at the same time in between rains and all that.
Usually then June, it's about then we start getting ready to band spray sugar beets, and we start thinking about our interseed mix and side dressing the corn and the sugar beets kind of through that whole time. And then, oh, we have usually 150 acres of cereal rye. That usually comes end of July, first part of August, which is about the same time as the strip till conference. So we're usually always trying to decide, do we do it before or are we going to do it after?
And it always feels really good when we get it done before we go, because then the drive back, it don't matter what time we get back.
Noah Newman:
So you plant the cereal rye in the summer, late summer?
Ryan Shaw:
Nope. We actually, we plan it in the fall and then it gets harvested.
Noah Newman:
[inaudible 00:45:12] harvested.
Ryan Shaw:
Yep. So then we usually go to the strip till conference in first part of August. And when we get back, it's usually, we're about starting early dig sugar beets. It's like a lottery, and we we'll get the factory started. So we'll usually have to dig a few here and there.
Oh, in the last week of June, usually we end up starting to have to do the leaf spot spray starts for the sugar beets is a big thing. So we-
Noah Newman:
Do you spray for [inaudible 00:45:54] and all that?
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah, mostly [inaudible 00:45:57] leaf spot and the powdery mildew stuff. The wet mornings, we get, the dew hangs around and if it stays 70 degrees overnight, infection will come in, real quick. So we usually end up doing that and we usually got to spray about four times, five times. So that keeps us pretty busy. And then usually we plant a couple like... These soybeans we're planting here are, I think one sixes for maturity. Then we have a whole bunch of one twos that we're going to put in. We usually do the one twos or the one fours to break up our soybean harvest, a little bit.
So we have some that come off a little bit earlier. Dry beans are pretty popular in this area, and the early soybeans gets us a chance to get in and do some harvesting about the same time as those guys are going. We can get some cover crops started and then usually we hope to finish the beans by the time we start a permanent pile of sugar beets, that is usually about the 20th, 23rd of October. And then when we're done with the sugar beets, then we start corn and finish with corn and we're usually done with corn about November 15th, just in time to...
Noah Newman:
Right before Thanksgiving.
Ryan Shaw:
Yep. And go sit in the hunting shack for deer season and just go to take a nap because we're just too tired.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. Going to be exhausting.
Ryan Shaw:
Uh-huh. And then usually, kind of in between all that, we are hitting up about every meeting we can, that's close, and trying to be part of everything.
Noah Newman:
What are your approximate seeding rates for each crop?
Ryan Shaw:
Soybeans, we're at 120,000 seeds an acre. We started at 140 when we started strip tilling. We've slowly started backing it down with putting it through the seed plates and stuff. We're getting a lot better stands and we haven't had to deal with, white mold's quite a big deal around here. He will adjust and we'll make prescriptions sometimes, if we know we have a real sandy part of a field, he'll bump it up in those spots and get that 140 on it, just to try and shade the ground some. And corn, with the twin row corn, we were doing 38,000 seeds. That gave us about a 10 to 10 and a half inch triangle. We lowered it down. This year, we got a second planter, so we'll plant at 36,000 in a single row at 30 inch. And sugar beets are 54,000 to 60,000 and we're in a 30 inch space for that. So we're usually right around there. And then the same thing, genetics and everything have gotten so good, we've found we've been able to back that down a little bit, and we're getting just as good or better stands than what we used to, back before some seed treats and coatings and stuff like that.
Noah Newman:
And then what kind of planters do you have, again? Do you have two of them, or...
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah, we have two planters, they're both stacked full [inaudible 00:49:40] planters, 12 row or 30 foot. One has the center fill on it, and that is the twin row. And we used that originally to plant even the sugar beets. We jacked a row up and built a hitch to offset it four inches to get that row in the center, but we were carrying a lot of weight on that very first pass, early in the year. And so this winter, we bought another [inaudible 00:50:08] same year and everything, so parts are interchangeable, and it's just single row and with a seed hopper so no center fill, nice and light and it floats over the ground real well. So we're going to use it for corn this year in a single row, so we can have the soybean planter going at the same time.
Next year, we'll have a field, 160 acre field that we are going to block off in 90 foot strips in the field and do 90 foot of twin row, 90 foot a single row, all the way across the field, and see what the difference is. Everybody wants to know, is there a yield bump, is there not? And so we figured we'll be able to see it.
The one major reason why we were going to single row corn this year was, we've been doing in furrow pop-up. And with that planter, the twin row planter, we set it up, we needed a 12 row for sugar beets, well, then we open a valve and split it into two seed trenches. And the idea of an acre is an acre, but if I have two seed trenches and I'm splitting the value of what should be in one seed trench and now I'm putting it in two, it's not enough for that corn, unless you get that sure shot or the pulsing stuff, and we usually want to spend the extra money. And right now we figured rather than doubling the fertilizer rate to put more in a trench, we just put it into a single row to try it for now, and then next year do the studies on same volume of fertilizer, everything, single row and same in the twin and just split it into two, and then do a few passes where we double the fertilizer rate, to see, and then do the pencil sharpening and things, see which one made the most money or broke even.
Noah Newman:
[inaudible 00:52:18].
Ryan Shaw:
Yeah. We've been just as interested as everybody else, but at the time, that's what we wanted to do. We wanted narrow or twin row soybeans to close the row sooner, was what we were going for. And the twin row corn was intriguing to us at the time, as fertilizer prices and everything started climbing, and seed costs. So we thought, well, you know what, we can lower our seed costs by a single row, the fertilizer a little bit...
Noah Newman:
And that'll wrap things up for this edition of the Strip Till Farmer Podcast. Big thanks to Yetter Manufacturing for making the series possible. Thanks to Ryan and Melissa Shaw for giving us a peek behind the curtain. And thanks to you, as always, for tuning in. Until next time, for all things strip till, head to striptillfarmer.com. Have a great day.
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