Mark Vander Pol farms 500 acres of corn and soybeans near Edgerton, MN. He also has two hog barns which supply his needed manure. Last fall he went out with a tool bar attached to the back of his tank and applied manure in narrow strips. This spring he made one pass through those same fields and planted his crops on top of those strips. This approach of applying manure in narrow strips works well for him.

The work of the six-row VTI toolbar on his manure tank is straight forward: a wavy coulter tills the soil, the manure is injected behind the coulter and two “catcher’s mitt” disks guide soil back into place.

“I shove the trash out of the way a little bit,” Vander Pol said. “I’m leaving the corn stalks and everything. I found it’s a lot easier to move trash out of the way a little rather trying to beat it all up into small enough chunks that you can plant over them.”

He said that while he would like to have trash whippers on the tool bar, he feels it may cause problems during application and it does work without them.

 “The beauty part of this is that the manure gets five-to-six inches down,” he said. “Before, when we put the manure on the surface, we’d have covering disks; but that manure would stay on the top a little, so later on in the summer when it gets dry, your nutrients tend to be up near the top vs. getting down deeper where there’s more moisture and the plants can take them in a little easier.”

All this happens with very little soil disturbance.

Vander Pol had heard about strip-till manure application, and in 2019 he decided to experiment with 60 acres of his cropland. He was able to borrow a VTI toolbar from a neighbor.

“It really worked out quite well,” he said, and decided to expand his acres. To do that, “I needed to get a different manure tank and applicator, and also more accurate GPS signal to make it work. I have a 6-row manure applicator and a 12-row planter, so you need to be relatively accurate on that.”

That required upgrading to RTK GPS. His strip-tilling does not leave a visible path that is easy to follow. “Sometimes it’s a little hard to see where the strips are because there is just a minimal mound,” he said.

Since Vander Pol applies fertilizer in the fall and plants in the spring, he will usually do a little digging to make sure where he’s at; but the RTK GPS is typically accurate to within less than an inch.

While no approach is the perfect one, Vander Pol sees real advantages to strip-till manure application. This will be his third year of using it on all acres.

“I think it definitely minimizes your costs,” he said. “You don’t do tillage for free. I have a seed business, so in spring things are pretty busy. To be able to just go out and plant and not spend a day digging first, that’s pretty nice.”

The long-term advantages are even more important.

“You are getting better soil health out of this,” he said. “I think the soil is becoming a healthier soil, more the cottage cheese vs. the fine particle type soil.”

His fields may not look as nice as a worked field, but he’s not giving up anything in yield and likes the way his fields have responded to all kinds of weather.

“I’m seeing it having some advantages when it’s wet and when it’s dry. When it’s a dry spring, you are planting right into moisture. You don’t have to worry about the soil drying out.” He also noted that the crops seem to have much better drought tolerance.

“Last year we were drier than normal, and I had my best corn yields ever.”

When there was a day of very high wind in early June, and the sky was full of dirt, he lost no top soil from his fields.

In the recent June downpours, Vander Pol received over ten inches of rain in few days.

“I’m very pleased how my fields held up,” he said. “The soil takes on a different structure after a while when you’re not working it. You don’t have that fine particle size on top so you get a larger particle size that doesn’t move as easy. It really didn’t move much soil because I had all my roots and stalks there from the year before in the soil, so it wouldn’t start taking off.”

Vander Pol was able to make a comparison on his own farm. He had one field where he had reshaped waterways and put in tile lines, and he had worked the ground to get it smoothed out again. That field did not fare as well in the excessive rain.

As Vander Pol likes to say, this is not the “easy button” to success. There is upfront cost like having the proper equipment and an accurate GPS system. But he would definitely say it’s worth a try, experimenting on a small piece, as he did, before going all in.

“If what you have now is working, that’s okay,” he said, “but give it a shot. It can increase your yields … minimize your costs … and you’re getting better soil health. I think strip-till manure application holds a lot of promise.”

If you have questions, Vander Pol’s email address is mjvpfarms@gmail.com.   

Click here for more Industry News.