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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by DigiFarm, we visit with 2024 Strip-Till Innovator Award recipient Chris Perkins at his Banded Ag facilities in Otwell, Ind.
Perkins shares his formula for growing a 300-bushel corn crop as he talks shop with fellow strip-tiller and Montag territory manager Harold Crawford. Perkins discusses the value of residue and fungicides in a strip-till system and explains how and why he’s combining dry and liquid fertilizer on his LandLuvr strip-till rig.
Plus, Perkins and Crawford talk about the potential advantages of strip-tilled soybeans, fall vs. spring strip-till, biologicals and more!
Use the promo code DIGIFARM to receive 15% off your 2024 National Strip-Tillage Conference registration. Head to StripTillConference.com to download the program and register.
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The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by DigiFarm.
DigiFarm VBN is an RTK corrections provider utilizing our privately owned network across much of the US. We work with all brands of GPS receivers and have numerous ways in how we can deliver our RTK corrections. DigiFarm has our in house designed modem elevate and our popular Bluetooth device called the Beacon used in conjunction with our DigiFarm VBN app. We also can use other OEM installed modem devices along with displays that have NTRIP capabilities.
DigiFarm VBN provides industry leading technologies, support, and resources to the dealer as well as end user. DigiFarm VBN uses its own base stations to create a virtual base giving the end user greater accuracy and reliability at industry leading pricing.
DigiFarm VBN is used in the AG industry by growers, producers, ag retailers, agronomist, and provides dealership opportunities to precision ag dealers. DigiFarm continues to grow not only by our ever-expanding network but also by growth in autonomy , robotic and drone technologies as they become more common place in our industry.
Full Transcript
Noah Newman:
Welcome to another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by DigiFarm. I'm your host, technology editor Noah Newman. A friendly reminder, use the promo code DigiFarm to get 15% off your National Strip-Tillage Conference registration fee that's at striptillconference.com. Type in DigiFarm, D-I-G-I-F-A-R-M, to get 15% off. We'd love to see you there August 8th and 9th in Madison, Wisconsin for the National Strip-Tillage Conference. All right, on today's episode we're visiting with 2024 Strip-Till Innovator Award recipient Chris Perkins at his Banded Ag facilities in Otwell, Indiana. Our first stop takes us inside Chris's office where he explains the significance of these vintage DeKalb bags that are hanging from his wall.
Chris Perkins:
Hi there. I was asked earlier why the bags are hanging up in my office. What we do every year, my wife finds old DeKalb seed bags since we use DeKalb, and tries to find them vintage off eBay or Etsy or whatever, and if a field will average dry over 300, we get it framed. We put the name of the field up, we put what hybrid it was, the year, and then what it was. Like this field here, it wound up going 317. Interesting thing about that is the end rows just murdered us on that. That whole field average if you just took the end rows away was just little over 347. I can tell you how much damage you do to them, just going in there constantly and applying applications. We got a couple other ones over here.
There's one right here, last year, it's on 120 acre farm. It wound up going 306, at I think 37, 38,000 and then they go back to '21. This was one of the first fields that I actually had go over 300. We didn't have any in '22. '22 is kind of a nightmare year for us, but we picked back up again in '23, and hopefully we can hit it again here in '24. Just kind of something neat as a keepsake, if you will, of knowing what we did, when we did it. I remember being younger and when a field would hit 200, it was like, oh my lord, it's enormous. It seems like we went a lot faster from the 250 to 300 range than what we went from the 200 to the 250 range. Does that translate back from 300 to 350? I don't know. Time will tell.
Noah Newman:
What do you think are some of the keys to getting to that 300 bushel mark? I know you probably need 30 minutes to explain everything, but what comes to mind?
Chris Perkins:
No, it goes a lot about what I talked back in a lot of my presentations, understanding the math. Starting with a band of nutrition below the plant, picking the correct hybrid, feeding that hybrid, and then protecting the health of that hybrid. I hate to say it's that easy, but once you start to get the hang of it, it starts becoming a lot easier. A few years ago, my challenge was a 300 average field. Now my challenge is a 350 average field. It stair-steps up.
Noah Newman:
Let's head outside now and listen in as Perkins talk shop with fellow strip-tiller and Montag territory manager Harold Crawford.
Harold Crawford:
I know I had a guy tell me years ago that was doing strip-till a long time, and I said something about trash whippers. He said, "Harold, it's not trash. It's residue."
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, it's pretty important residue, to be honest from a financial standpoint. But, these things I always tell guys when they're running closing wheels. Myself for my farm, I've got to have them because I just do so much corn on corn. In fact, this is the first year in years I'm even planting beans. It wasn't because I wanted to, it's just the farm grew so much with a local opportunity where a customer we were working with retired, asked me to take over his farm, and I just didn't want to have 14 or 1500 acres of corn. We weren't really set up for that. We split it up. We're about 60/40 corn to beans. But, guys running one of these in the springtime with a field that's been burnt down properly and it's pretty clean, I don't even really know if you need a row cleaner sometimes.
Harold Crawford:
Sure.
Chris Perkins:
You can cheapen up a bar pretty good by knocking off.
Harold Crawford:
That's one thing I noticed coming down here today, how many, I assume, cover crop fields had been rye that have already been burned down.
Chris Perkins:
Yep.
Harold Crawford:
Up in my part of the country, we're not even thinking about burning down yet.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah.
Harold Crawford:
Yeah, that's a little interesting being able to come down here and see some of that.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, it's a little bit different when you get back north of Champaign. I'm really good friends with Fred Velo and he always says, "We don't call it soil down here, we just call it dirt." He says it's amazing, he can hold a plant up sometimes, and I kind of laugh and tease him about whose yields are a little bit higher, his or mine.
Harold Crawford:
I've got a brother-in-law that farms east of Champaign-Urbana. He's not keeping up with you. I mean, he's got about as foolproof ground as you can get.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah.
Harold Crawford:
You talk about flat and black, I look to his as flat and black.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, it's funny. One of the things I learned, especially when we started doing strip-till and banding, it almost seemed like the poorer environment you were on, the better that thing worked. You didn't have the heavy clays, you didn't have the heavy mags, you didn't have the heavy CECs, the high organic matters. That just, everything could work in harmony so much better without having these, what I call them, out of balance variances in fields. It's funny how a guy thinks. I can remember thinking my whole life, growing up and hearing my grandfather and my dad and friends talk about, "Oh, if we just farmed in central Illinois or northern Illinois."
Harold Crawford:
Why didn't the mule make it another a hundred miles before it died?
Chris Perkins:
Now I'm sitting back looking at it going, "I don't know if we want to be doing that, farming that with what we're doing now," because it's a lot drastic different world to learn. I work with a lot of growers all over the US and I pretty much, about every single time somebody tells me where they're from and I say, "Well, I don't know where that is, I'm sorry." I just point to a map and I'll point to Indianapolis and I'll say, "Here, are you above this or below it?" They'll know, "We're above it." I said, "Oh, you got a mag problem, then. Fix that. If you're below that," I said, "you might have some other issues we got to take a look at."
Harold Crawford:
Sure, sure. Exactly. But it's just like, I remember 30 years ago when we got away from 30 inch soybeans and at that time went to 15s. The poorer the dirt, the more response we got.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah.
Harold Crawford:
Where we got into our really good dirt, we didn't need 15s to keep up.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah.
Harold Crawford:
That ground took care of itself. That needed to be corn on corn ground.
Chris Perkins:
See, now I didn't want to go buy a bean planter, so I got 30 inch row beans this year. We'll see how that works out. If I could just make it work strip-tilling them, my life would be so much better.
Harold Crawford:
Why not?
Chris Perkins:
We just haven't had any luck. I mean, we could run the bar from a tillage standpoint, but as far as banding fertilizer in front of soybeans, we've seen a bushel here, a bushel there, but it's nothing that's just been a home run.
Harold Crawford:
We have got started doing some of that years ago, back when I was still 30 inch row corn and beans before we switched over to 20s. The guy that I had building strips for me, we went in one year and they strip-tilled my corn stalks and I put beans in on top of them, extremely happy the way it went. Two years later, we were back on the same farm and we couldn't get the residue to go through the machine. That was trying to do fall strips in late October, and we've not really tried it since. We're really in our 20 inch rows trying to develop that 20 inch strip of some sort. We're not going in and just strictly no tilling beans into standing corn stalks. We're trying to size up the residue a little bit and we're playing around with a couple of things, but we'd like to get back to that banded fertility for our beans at the same time. We think that's really paid off for us.
Chris Perkins:
That's one of the, it's funny you mentioned that 20 inch, I was about this close to buying a 20 inch row corn planter this morning on an auction. There was a 1795 20 inch exact emerge. I thought that would fit well here, but I just didn't have the guts to pull the trigger on it for right now.
Harold Crawford:
You just couldn't do it, could you?
Chris Perkins:
No, and I love the concept. Right now I've got a 30 inch row, 16 row corn planter, exact emerge hydraulic downforce. I mean, it's got everything you can put on one or have on one. We're running two by two by two. I've got it coming on both sides in the ground. I've got it coming out the back. I've got in furrow, we can hit it everywhere.
Harold Crawford:
Yeah.
Chris Perkins:
I thought, if I just take that next step and go ahead and get a 20 inch row bar and then have a 20 inch row planter, now the corn and bean thing's a whole lot easier.
Harold Crawford:
That is the nice thing about doing 20s on everything.
Chris Perkins:
Then I got to trade off a new corn head for a 20 inch row corn head.
Harold Crawford:
You don't just go find a nice one or two-year-old 20 inch corn head.
Chris Perkins:
No, no you don't. I think it's the future. I truly do, especially when this short corn comes out.
Harold Crawford:
With short corn, it's going to-
Chris Perkins:
When short corn comes out, you will be able to go to high population, high density, I mean I'm talking high 40, low 50,000 populations in corn.
Harold Crawford:
Yeah.
Chris Perkins:
Really shrink them up, be able to control it better in wind events, and really start hitting your stride on yield.
Harold Crawford:
I think one of the things we see with our 20 inch rows is our yields haven't really just been huge exponentially, but at least we think we're growing a lot better stocks, we think we're growing more organic matter, and if we can keep growing more organic matter, we're hoping that that reflects back to let's keep everything working better in the ground and help ourselves out. Now, I like the idea that when I go through, you may have 9 inches of space between every corn stock. I'm looking at 10 or 11 inches. In theory it's great. We do feel that we're raising a lot better stock quality now than what we did at that time.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, it'd be understandable. Usually my average seed placements, we're about 5.2, about 5.4 inches and that's on 38, 38.5 for plant pop.
Harold Crawford:
Yeah, and we can be in that 10 at 36, or somewhere in that area.
Chris Perkins:
It's definitely a positive. I wouldn't argue that none. But, 20 inch inch row corn is actually how I got kind of started with banding. We was actually at University of Illinois with Dr. Velo, and I took a group of growers up there. Fred was really trying to figure out 20 inch row corn to help seed companies from a placement standpoint, which hybrids liked it better than others. It made sense. My wife, God bless her, I love her to death, but she hates to be on an elevator when there's a bunch of people. It's a human psyche thing, right? Well, is it possible a plant could have that? It's amazing some of the characteristics in nature that shares when you think about the symbiotic relationships with things.
I think, maybe it's not a plant thing up top that they don't like, maybe it's a root thing down below they don't like. Through a lot of work and research, Fred was able to come to some conclusions. But, I'll never forget it. We had a group of farmers there and they're all looking at leaf structure and plant architecture and everything. Here I am, army crawling across the ground, and I'm sitting here looking at the fruits. Fred comes up and he's like, "What are you doing?" I said, "I don't think the problem's up there. I think the problem's down here." He said, "Really?" We got to looking at that more. We all left that day. I went home and I just thought about that for a while. I thought, if plants don't mind touching each other or plants do mind touching each other, that tells me that some of those plants may have a different reaction if you put fertility to them. That's how we started the strip-till-by-hybrid trials.
Harold Crawford:
Okay.
Chris Perkins:
What we would do down here is we would band a hybrid, and then right beside it we would conventional farm. You would have eight rows of banded, eight rows not. The results were just incredible. There would be some hybrids, there would be no difference, none. Didn't matter what you did.
Harold Crawford:
Some of them, the roots didn't want to work that hard to get to where they wanted to eat.
Chris Perkins:
Correct. There'd be other ones would be 50, 60 bushel difference, just from me to you.
Harold Crawford:
Yeah.
Chris Perkins:
It's like, wow. Then you could repeat this, which was even cooler, because it was like, all right, this wasn't a fluke. We've done this quite a few times now. That's literally what led to the beginning of us strip-tilling, to be honest. Once the growers started to see that and they were able to go out and touch the plots and see the plots that we did down here in southern Indiana, I told everybody, I said, "I think there's something to this. I'll take the risk on the first bar, and hopefully you guys will get comfortable enough then you guys will be buying your own bars in a few years." That part didn't work out too well with ...
Noah Newman:
Let's burn a quick time out. Here's a message from our sponsor DigiFarm. DigiFarm VBN is an RTK corrections provider utilizing our privately owned network across much of the US. We work with all brands of GPS receivers, and have numerous ways in how we can deliver our RTK corrections. DigiFarm has our in-house design modem Elevate and our popular Bluetooth device called the Beacon, used in conjunction with our Digifarm VBN app. We also can use other OEM installed modem devices along with displays that have in-trip capabilities.
DigiFarm VBN provides industry-leading technologies, support and resources to the dealer as well as the farmer. DigiFarm VBN uses its own base stations to create a virtual base, giving the end user greater accuracy and reliability at industry-leading prices. Again, get 15% off your National Strip-Tillage Conference registration with the promo code DigiFarm. That's promo code DigiFarm for 15% off. Head to striptillconference.com to register for the conference, which takes place August 8th and 9th in Madison, Wisconsin
Harold Crawford:
Where I'm at up in central Illinois, the amount of strip-till is just really expanding. I mean, we've got several manufacturers that have bars that work in our area and we're just seeing, in my situation, we had a fertilizer company that started with a strip-till rig, had a progressive bar that got made over in Hudson, Illinois, that was the strip-till bar that started it all off in a lot of ways.
Chris Perkins:
Right.
Harold Crawford:
Then they moved on to new things and new things, and now they're running three bars and they're running them as early in September as somebody will let them go until it freezes. They're able to run that long season that you don't get that opportunity for.
Chris Perkins:
No, I mean, I probably need to quit being as bully. Bully is a bad word, but hard-headed would be fine. I've just seen the data on spring and fall, and we just had so much more success with the spring. But, some guys just aren't going to do spring strip-till because it is, it's a big risk. In the past, I've not really wanted to open that segment of the business up because there's not really a lot of me running around. I don't know too many people that started just this strip-till business and then it just take off. You wanted to covet that and make sure that, maybe it was a control freak standpoint a little bit, but you didn't want to do something in the fall time strip-tilling for a guy and it not be successful.
Harold Crawford:
Exactly.
Chris Perkins:
Then he'd go out and he tells his neighbors, "Well that didn't work." Then that neighbor tells his neighbor, "That didn't work." Then here I'm sitting here with this large investment that we just put in, it's like, we know that, we kind of said that, but you didn't want to do it in the spring, so we come and did it in the fall. But now I think word of mouth has gotten out like, "Hey, there's something going on here with these guys." Maybe we do look at moving to that next step of where we could band, PNK for sure in the fall time. Cut everything else probably out of the mix. Our soils are just, you're dealing with 1 to 1.4% organic matter.
Harold Crawford:
Sure.
Chris Perkins:
CECs that are in single digits. We're not holding onto a lot of stuff.
Harold Crawford:
There's a reason that the spring trips work for you.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, yeah. I would love to be able to do it in the fall and put our nitrogen down and then come back and touch it up with the planter or with the Y-drop application. I mean, that would just be fantastic, but we just-
Harold Crawford:
You are not in that spot.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, we're not. That's okay. Once you learn to accept where you are and what you got, then you can start making decisions to get it better. But, always wanting to be somewhere else or wanting to do something else, it's never made a lot of sense to me. I hear guys all the time that speak at conferences, and very intelligent, influential people, and they make these bold statements like it applies to everyone. I know they don't mean that, but if a person doesn't quite understand everything they're dealing with and they try to apply those practices to theirs, it could be great or it could be the absolute disaster.
Harold Crawford:
Exactly. You have to find where you are.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah.
Harold Crawford:
There's a reason that some people thrive in an area and some people don't. It's a matter that there's successful people everywhere. Now, it's just a matter of how they got to be successful. I had a guy call me yesterday looking at a piece of equipment, and he's on the edge of the bluffs where everything goes down into the Illinois River. He's got ground very similar to what you guys have here. I said, "Are you looking at fall strips, spring strips?" He said, "I think spring strips." He said, "I'm not comfortable breaking things loose in the fall," with the topography that they've got.
Chris Perkins:
There's definitely truth in that. I mean, I got a bunch of guys in Missouri right now, they're fall anhydrous guys, but they're now doing spring strip-till and it's just unlocked a whole nother level for them.
Harold Crawford:
Yeah.
Chris Perkins:
We've had a lot of success with quite a few growers up there with a couple other companies that I'm working with. But, take back my point what I was talking about earlier. I remember a while back, I understood the value of what that stover was.
Harold Crawford:
Yes.
Chris Perkins:
A 350 bushel corn crop is worth a ton of money, regardless of the grain, just in the value in that residue. It was like, okay, how do we get that to break down faster? How do we get that to decompose? I spoke to a gentleman, this was about seven years ago, and I said something about a chopping head, a Stockmaster head.
Harold Crawford:
Yeah.
Chris Perkins:
"Oh, you don't want to do that. We've done that." I said, "Okay, what happened?" "Well, it cuts it so fine that it'll mat to the ground and it don't dry out." I though, "Oh, I don't want that." Went to a Yetter Devastator on my John Deere head and it worked good. I liked it, but it didn't do exactly what I was wanting to see out of it. Finally my local John Deere guy called me up and he said, "Hey," he goes, "I'm going to bring you a new Deere head with a Stockmaster. I just want you to demo it. Just see what you like." We probably didn't go 100 yards and I called him and I bought it. It was everything I was wanting. I thought I can keep that, I think, from gluing itself to the dirt and creating a wet zone, if you will. Through the use of using some AMS sometimes, ATS sometimes, Miner, UAN, we started to learn how to break these things down without having to use all these biological products we were buying and all this other, I guess a good way to say would be noise.
Harold Crawford:
Yes.
Chris Perkins:
Once we started to understand nutrient cycling and able to break those things down, all of a sudden that Stockmaster had changed everything in our game.
Harold Crawford:
Sure.
Chris Perkins:
That's where I go back of listening to somebody that was a pretty knowledgeable person, and because of what happened to them, they apply it to all. That was a very dangerous thing for me to not think about further into that conversation. But that's how you grow, how you learn. Big reason for the liquid tank on there, so this was one of the things when I kind of started working with Lynn, I said, "It always seems like it's the dry guys versus the liquid guys, and the liquid guys can do this and their way's better, and the dry guys can do this and their way's better." I said, "There's a lot of synergistic things between both that you can accomplish if we had the ability to incorporate both onto a bar." He said, "What are you thinking?" I said, "I need somewhere we can put a 500 gallon tank on this thing." I said, "I want to be able to put on 10 gallon per acre. I have an idea of what I want in that liquid mix to compliment the dry mix, and off we go."
I've had a lot of people ask me, "Are you running biologicals?" No, we haven't ran biologicals in years. I don't have anything against them, I don't have anything against anybody trying and using them, more power to them. I just have never really understood wanting to introduce something that's not native to my soils. I think there could be some problems. When a company comes out with a product from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, I can't help but think my soil might be a little different than some guys in California or Arizona or the East Coast. I don't get too caught up in that stuff and we just try to promote what we have in the ground now.
Harold Crawford:
Are you going in the row or in the furrow, right with the dry?
Chris Perkins:
Yeah.
Harold Crawford:
Okay.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, so on the back of the row units on the back of the shank there is a dry tube, and then we just literally welded a 3/8th stainless tube right to the backside. When the dry's coming out, the liquid's just dropping right on it. We're just literally impregnating the dry on the go.
Harold Crawford:
Okay.
Chris Perkins:
That was the reason why I wanted to get that incorporated. I can tell you this. Strip-tilling banding, there is some best friends that it has, polymer coated nitrogen, whether it be through a product like Purcell, like we use pure yield, things that have very good flow ability, those are just milk and chocolate chip cookies. They just go together, right? Well, these fulvics and these humics, somewhat more fulvic than humic in my opinion, but these fulvics and sugars have a very valuable place with this as well. Almost try and create an energy drink for the biology below the ground of all the fertilizer you're putting down there, and it just explodes from there.
Harold Crawford:
Well, and as we've visited with the agronomist and then we bring up different things, and we start talking about soil biology and said, "Okay, are you introducing bugs or are you using bug food?" We've been messing with some sugar and some different things for a long time. We said, "All we're trying to do is just encourage what's there."
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, yeah. I'm more of a bug food type of guy, I guess you could say.
Harold Crawford:
Yeah.
Chris Perkins:
I mean, and they get so confusing too when you think about it. I mean, some of these guys, I'm lucky from the standpoint I've got an incredible team. I've got some incredible teachers. I've got a lot of resources throughout the US that can help me. When I was just farming on my own with my dad or whatever, I probably wouldn't have those resources. It can just get so damn confusing what all these products are, and the basilis that they have and what form it is and what their plate counts are and all this. It's just noise.
Has it worked for some people? I'm sure it has. I've been guilty of, in my previous career, of promoting it. I mean, there's a damn video running around with me and Fred where I talk pretty highly about the product. We had good success, I think, with the product. But I always said in the video, I didn't know if it was because of the product or if it was because of corn on corn. Well, it's amazing. I'm still doing the corn on corn, not using that product, and the results are still there. I think I answered that question.
Harold Crawford:
How many years have you been doing the corn on corn?
Chris Perkins:
Not as many. I mean, we don't have anything like no 20, 30 year type stuff. This field out here has been corn now for five years. We soil test every single year, whether it be in February or March. We wait for the ground to get close in temperature every year.
Harold Crawford:
Exactly, I understand that.
Chris Perkins:
I'm not worried about, is it the middle of February or the middle of March? I'm worried about, are we right around 52, 53 degrees Fahrenheit in that soil so then we can know we're keeping things even?
Harold Crawford:
Consistent.
Chris Perkins:
I mean, with where we have raised our soil tests, it's incredible, but we're not spreading fertilizer. We're banding fertilizer. We keep growing a better crop and a better crop. It's the one thing I'm a huge believer in. It took me a while to understand it, but a good crop will grow you an even better crop the next year. It is amazing how that works.
Harold Crawford:
Well, we go right back to that residue we were talking about before.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah.
Harold Crawford:
300, 350 bushels worth of residue should a year or two down the road give you that much more food value than 200 or 250.
Chris Perkins:
Oh, absolutely. It's night and day. It's funny, I've been with some growers around here and they'll say, "Well, so-and-so's corn said it made this," and I'll laugh and be like, "No, it didn't." "How do you know?" I'm like, "I can see the residue." You can see the residue out there. I said, "I'm telling you, there is a huge difference between 250 bushel corn residue and 300 bushel corn residue." If you've never seen 350 or even 400, it is a nightmare in dealing with sometimes.
Harold Crawford:
That's where just physically trying to size that residue to give your other programs an opportunity to be more successful.
Chris Perkins:
It's funny too, it's not just the amount that is out there. We know what that is. We know that that is basically a one-to-one relationship. It's about 52:48, 51:49 depending on you're listening to, grain to stover. But, those ratios are not going to change. But one of the interesting things that I've noticed, and I've teased Fred about this quite a bit, the healthier the residue, the better it breaks down. When we did some trials with fungicide work a few years ago, the corn that didn't have fungicide, it was back in '16, the rust year, it was 80 to 100 bushel less than where you did apply a fungicide. But, what was amazing was a couple months later, where we didn't apply the fungicide, the corn residue looked like we'd just combined it yesterday, because it was already brown and dead the day we got there.
Harold Crawford:
It wasn't the microbial activity.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, it had nothing to give up that really the biology wanted. It was just junk. But, the corn that had the extra sugars in it and that had the extra fertility in it and had the makeups of a decent corn crop, well, I mean that corn was just degrading and as black and carbon on it as could be. That was when I realized right then, there's more to these fungicides than just keeping these plants healthy. It's also a decomposition later for breaking down to keep the next crop and get it going. All these things, they all touch one another in some form or fashion of trying to mend these programs together.
Harold Crawford:
Okay. Looking at this, when you're doing your corn on corn, are you trying to go 15 inches off each year?
Chris Perkins:
That tractor right there, it's got two lines in it. If it's an even year, it'll grab the 2018 line, and if it's an odd year it grabs the 2017 line. They're both 15 inches off from one another.
Harold Crawford:
Okay.
Chris Perkins:
We don't have to worry about shifts or doing any of that stuff, just am I in an even year or am I in an odd year? That was how we go with it.
Harold Crawford:
Well, it's kind of funny. I'm friends with one of the Alliance salesmen from over in Illinois, and we were just having this discussion as I was driving last week. We went out and ran new borders on everything. He started talking about how they use borders and lines on their farm. He said, "Well, we plant 40 foot and we plant 60 foot." He said, "We just make passes at every 20 feet." He said, "I just use the evens when I'm doing this and I'll just pass two and four and six on down the line." He said, "I'm never changing my lines."
Chris Perkins:
Yeah.
Harold Crawford:
Always using the same lines.
Chris Perkins:
Yeah, I met a guy a while back. He said, "Put your AB line right on the edge of your field, and then whatever you pull in with, you can just shift it. If it's a 60 foot planter, shift at 30 foot. If it's a 40 foot planter, shift at 20 foot." I think you're going to have so many shifts on that in the end, you're not going to know where you started or where you came from. I wasn't a real big fan of that, so we just have lines that I've been using for a while. With new customers, we have to create new lines and we just name them, literally says plant and then the year, and then what side of the field we're on and which direction we're going.
Noah Newman:
All right, that'll wrap things up for this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast. Thanks to Chris Perkins and Harold Crawford for that conversation. Also, thanks to our sponsor DigiFarm. Friendly reminder, use the promo code DigiFarm at striptillconference.com when you sign up for the National Strip-Tillage Conference and you'll get 15% off your registration fee. Chris Perkins will be at the conference. I'll be there. We hope to see you there as well. Until next time, for all things Strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. Thanks so much for listening and have a great day.
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