Brought to you by:
On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter, we catch up with Donnellson, Iowa, strip-tiller Mark Dobson.
Dobson strip-tills 420 acres of certified organic corn, soybeans and wheat, and he custom strip-tills about 2,000 acres annually in southeast Iowa. The innovative strip-tiller shares some of his top lessons learned from pairing strip-till with organic farming and explains how he uses more than just yield to measure profitability.
Dobson also discusses his approach to planting green, precision technology and nutrient management, which includes lower nitrogen rates, a mix of 5-7 micronutrients and manure applications at 50% the recommended rate.
|
|
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. I'm your host, technology editor, Noah Newman. Big thanks to our sponsor, Yetter Farm Equipment, for making this podcast series possible. Over the next hour or so, we're going to catch up with Donnellson, Iowa's strip-tiller Mark Dobson. Really interesting conversation here. He strip-tills about 420 acres of certified organic corn, soybeans, and wheat. He also custom strip-tills about 2000 acres annually in southeast Iowa, so he is going to talk about some of the top things he's learned from the marriage of strip-till with organic farming, and he also explains how he uses more than just yield to measure profitability. He looks at profit bushels. We'll also talk about planting green, precision technology, nutrient management, manure applications, and much more.
Well, first of all, just tell us a little bit about your operation, where you're located and how many acres you farm and all that.
Mark Dobson:
I'm in extreme southern Iowa, southeast Iowa. I have 420 acres, and that's certified organic. Then, I farm another 100 acres of commercial crops. My organic is corn, soybeans, and wheat, and then my commercial acres are strong corn, usually three years of corn and then a year of soybeans.
Noah Newman:
And then, do you do custom strip-tilling as well?
Mark Dobson:
So I do somewhere between 1,500 to 2,000 acres a year of custom strip-till.
Noah Newman:
So let's go back and look at your strip-till origin story. So how long have you been strip-tilling and do you remember the motivation behind it?
Mark Dobson:
I personally have owned strip-till bar since 2008. I had acres custom done before that, so I guess what motivated me... From my family background, we always banded with the planter. We were dry fertilizer on the planter, and when we went away from that, we went to a 12-row planter actually in the late 90s, and I guess we just weren't as happy with the yields and thought that we gave up something by not banding. So for me, I guess the biggest motivation was getting back to banding but not slowing down a planter. So strip-till checked a lot of boxes because now, you have a clean strip to plant into. You have a raised bed that dries out earlier in the spring. You have warmer temperatures. If you aren't no-tilling, but if you get it all done in the fall, you're more or less no-tilling. You can just pull in and plant, and it allows you to focus more on getting the crop in the spring.
And I think that why I guess to say multiple motivators, that was probably the biggest reasoning for me. And then, as time has moved on, it's just proven time and time again to have a yield benefit, both corn and soybeans. I know a lot don't do it, but I strip-till my soybeans as well, and I think sometimes actually my better gains probably come from soybeans than it does from corn.
Noah Newman:
Wow. Yeah. You talked about how it improves your yields. What number can you put on that in terms of how much has strip-till improved your soybean yields?
Mark Dobson:
You know, I'd have to go a long ways back to even look at some of my trials. It was significant enough that it more than paid for the application and doing the work and keep [inaudible 00:03:26] machine. I guess as time went on, I didn't worry so much about whether there was yield increased or not. It came down more to the fact that I don't have to run as much nitrogen more in that 0.6 to 0.8 corn going into soybeans and corn on corn just because you are planting directly on top of that band. I have not seen higher nitrogen rates pay me back. So a lot of my corns... Like I'm being [inaudible 00:03:56] It only has 125 to 140 total units of... We can grow 200 bushel of corn pretty consistently.
Noah Newman:
Wow.
Mark Dobson:
For me, it's a mixed bag. I do still think there is a yield benefit to it, but it's a systems approach and the overall system that it's about net dollars. I mean, obviously, at the end of the week, it's not just about increasing yields. Sometimes if you can maintain yields but have $45 less on the front side, it's about net dollars at the end of the system.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, and time, too. I mean, what's the impact on your ley?
Mark Dobson:
That's the nicest part. I mean, you can make a pass in the fall and spring and then plant, and that's your season. I don't have other tillage passes, and it's just nice. It just frees up a lot of time. There's a lot of springs. I don't farm with my family directly, but my dad's farm, when I was farming with him and strip-tilling, it's just kind of nice. We could run two planters running on fall strips. You're planting that in a very short order compared to a lot of guys still run a very, what I call, conventional program. They run a field finisher or something like that. Then, someone's got to come and spread, so you're waiting on somebody else's schedule and then work the ground and then plant. And it just seems like at the end of the week, you can cover a lot more ground, and you can have all, I guess, I call it all hands on deck. Everybody gets to be there at the planter and making that move, and you're not trying to outrun a planter with the tillage tractor.
And it's not always that way. Some years, we don't get much done in the fall, and you're chasing a strip-till bar, so you're back to the same thing. And there's times we've actually changed up our program some and went to say only 60 units of in and put down it in dry so we could plant a day or two later instead of running anhydrous because typically, we run anhydrous as our nitrogen source. But I've even switched that up to make sure the planter keeps moving because I live in a region where weather gets very erratic come July, and the rains become very hit or miss. So timeliness of planting pretty much trumps everything as far as yields. So that's why I say sometimes a strip-till, the increase or lack of increase may not show up as much if you get into later spring or whatever. It definitely does if you're an early planter.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, it sounds like you do a little bit of a fall strip-till or spring strip-till. It kind of depends on the years you were talking about.
Mark Dobson:
Yeah, so I have a couple fields and even for some other guys that just are borderline highly erodible or highly erodible type fields, and some guys don't want to have four months of potential weather on it. They would rather wait and strip and plant. So I always do some spring. Me, personally, I would just soon have it done in the fall so that I don't have to wait on that in the spring and I'm not making any other passes. I think every time we compact something in the spring, we give up a little bit more bushels, and it's nice to just be able to pull in and plant. And then, the next time, it's seasoning as a sprayer, which is obviously on much wider tracks and less tracks. And then, a side-dress pass because I don't run insane high rates in the fall. A lot of guys run full one and done. On my own acres and part of my customer base will run as low as 60 pounds of anhydrous or 90 pounds of anhydrous.
And then, they're just planned returns with the side-dress bar just because I have no idea what winter's going to bring, and where we live, a lot of years we don't have a lot of winter. So on my own acres, I will probably start here next week and strip-till right behind the combine but I won't put any nitrogen on at all, and I'll just freshen it with anhydrous or urea or whatever in the spring and do it that way just because the last winter, we really never even had a hard freeze, and it's a lot of dollars sitting out there with a crop not growing.
Noah Newman:
On your farm, are you strip-tilling soybeans and corn or just soybeans?
Mark Dobson:
No, both.
Noah Newman:
Both, okay.
Mark Dobson:
Yep.
Noah Newman:
So what does your strip-till rig look like? What kind of bar is it and any unique features on it?
Mark Dobson:
So currently, I'm actually running... It's actually one of their first models, but I'm running a ZML toolbar. More of them have moved too as we've came forward, very adjustable from the cab, which I think is imperative if a guy's going to cover a lot of acres. I did a lot of years of what I call wrench to set kind of rigs where it took a while to change settings and do things. And especially, when you get into custom, you see so many different field conditions and stuff. It's nice to be able to make some adjustments from the cab.
Noah Newman:
What are you applying with your strip-till bar? Say, take me through your fertility plant on your farm. I'm sure it varies every year but kind of-
Mark Dobson:
Hundred percent. So-
Noah Newman:
For instance, this year, what did you do this year?
Mark Dobson:
Actually, I got some trials on some new products. I like to do that in side-by-sides, so I just did pass fields. So this year, I got a trial for Midwestern BioAg and I cannot remember what the name of the product was, but anyways, we have some trials with it next to what I would call conventional fertilizer program. On my farm, I typically run more of a crop removal or crop removed rate because it's rented ground, so not doing a lot of build. I fertilize basically for the crop I expect to grow, or if we have a tremendously awesome year, sometimes I'll replace what crop we just grew, I guess, if that makes any sense, just to kind of keep things in balance. But as far as a lot of build, I don't do that through the bar. I apply several elements.
I don't run just N, P, and K. Pretty heavy on elemental sulfur in the fall because it's nice that it breaks down over time, and per unit is a very cost-effective way to ensure a person has sulfur in season the following summer. And then, most guys aren't running things like manganese and zinc and boron, et cetera, and I do. So basically, it's five to nine elements are usually in my blend, a micro pack or something along that line. Hopefully, moving forward, either this rig or high-end pricing a new setup right now, but hopefully moving forward, I can go back to having some liquid, too. So I've done a little bit of liquid strip-till in the past, and I like it for micros and things like that just because if you put a... I tell people all the time, you put a drop of red food coloring in a million-gallon tank of water, you have a million gallons of pink water.
And that's the one thing nice about liquids is when it comes to micros, you know you have it everywhere where sometimes if you add a pound of something to a mix, that's 300 pounds. You don't find a lot of those granules when you dig up in the field. So I hope to get back to where I have even with just a small tank and electric pump or whatever and have flow columns. I don't really care how I do it. It would be nice to get some of my micros back to that because a lot of my customers don't have liquid on planters and don't have the ability to do that either. So just nice to go in and offer all that, and then they can just pull in and plant like I do.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. What's the challenge of going from making strips and applying the fertility on your farm to then having to switch it up completely to when you do someone else's farm and your custom strip-till business?
Mark Dobson:
The machines have gotten so flexible. That challenge is not near what it used to be. It's pretty easy to get rates styled now compared to when I started. It was a little more of a challenge when you were changing complete programs all the time. Honestly, the only challenge for me is... I've been in agronomy, so I guess I've been out of school, what, 21 years now. That sounds crazy, but I've been in agronomy for a long time. But the hard part for me is actually that people don't dive more into the full benefits of strip-till. And then, I think some guys, and this is just my opinion, I think guys run too high of rates of a lot of fertilizer to get the kind of yields they want to have. I think a lot of the fertilizer rates that I put on I don't think are needed when I hear their yield goals.
So honestly, the machines have become so flexible. As far as it being a concern or a problem, they just pull into any field and run. That's a couple acres. The scales are so accurate now, and both of my hoppers have their own scales. I mean, I can dial stuff in a few rounds as far as how the dry fertilizer is going to come out, but the biggest task for me is the fact that I haven't been able to get guys to increase sulfur rates. I've seen great increases in my farm and plant health and I guess less need or less rush when it comes to my fungicide applications and stuff like that. I see much better stay-green, much better overall crop health.
Not saying we still don't need fungicide because we're getting things like tar spot and things like that. It hasn't seem to matter if you have good fertility or not, they just kind of show up. So we still have some of that, but no, I've tried to get guys to push some of their rates, do some of the things, and I do a lot of research on my own acres and a couple of guys that will let me do some crazy stuff to prove it out. But getting people to change and realizing that it is a completely different system and that what I want to call commonplace fertility practices just because you were going to do X with a spreader rig does not mean you should do the same thing with a strip-till bar.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, so you hear all the time of people applying NPK, but as you were saying, you see the benefits of having a complete package. So what are all the micronutrients you're using like boron, zinc?
Mark Dobson:
So I run boron. I run zinc. I run manganese. I do run pelletized gypsum, yes. I really like it ahead of soybeans. So I did that two years ago, and that's when I started using it. I was more than happy with the results of that because a lot of guys have good pH, so they don't need lime, so they see calcium, and I think that's a place we failed epically in the agronomy world is explaining to people what free calcium is versus I need lime. So it's kind of hard to explain to somebody. It's like, "Well, I don't want my till to change. It's not going to change." "You're good. You're right where you need to be. You just need calcium for the crops that's coming up and in a form that is mobile." I think there was seven elements in my spring, one of my own farms this year.
Noah Newman:
And you custom blend this mix yourself?
Mark Dobson:
So I'm really lucky because I have a elevator really close by that will let me do a lot of stuff. It's a lot easier now that I have a twin-bin set up. I sometimes get fertilizers from two different people, which I'm sure looks weird to neighbors and stuff, but sometimes I get a mix from that Midwestern BioAg. I don't do a lot with them, but I do get my pelletized gypsum from them. They do have a couple products that I also run from them. So there's times that one hopper gets filled out of their stuff, and the local elevator does the rest. And then, a few times, I've actually had them just drop off like a half semi-load at the local place and just paid them to blend it with their product, and that has worked as well.
Noah Newman:
And how do you determine the rates of what you're putting on soil tests, tissue tests, or-
Mark Dobson:
So for me now, I've been doing this long enough. It's kind of going off long term trends, so it's kind of fun. I rented a new farm this year that really hasn't had anything done to it for a very long time, and the numbers are not what you would jump up and down about if you just bought it. We're just going to put it that way. And it's kind of nice to see how amazing the corn crop looks on it the first year based off of being strip-tilled and planted directly on top of that. So for me, my rates come from long-term testing on my own operation and realizing that I could continue pulling back things and not suffer in tissue samples or long-term soil tests. In fact, I've ran a lot of, say, 150 bushel of corn racks for customers that have grown a lot, 200 bushels of corn, and their soil tests have not suffered at all.
So like I said, in my own acres, I have farms where I have ran a 50% phosphate rate and not had anything show up at all in tissue samples, and I've been doing that for two years, but I have not soil tested this fall. But I will be blown away if it comes back and says, "You mined at this ground," because I just haven't been finding that in the strip-till system. So I would say I hear a lot of times the numbers tossed around 75% or 60% or whatever, and honestly, if that makes it feasible for a person to get into strip-till, if they need that to justify a rig, I would not tell somebody do not do that. In 10 years, you have shot yourself in the foot.
Noah Newman:
Now are you applying any manure in your operation?
Mark Dobson:
I do. So my organic is all manures. My commercial, I'm going to do some just because my manure is all taken by my organic, so my building's manure doesn't go anywhere else. But there is a neighbor barn a few miles down the road that I think is looking to get rid of some, so if I have a chance to get a manure, I'm always a fan of tilling manure. If I was very wealthy, I would have a second bar that was set up to run manure in the strip because that's always been a dream of mine, just never been a capital available dream of mine.
Noah Newman:
I hear you. Can you give us the details of how that works, applying manure in the strips, what do you use to do it, where you get it from, approximate rates and all that?
Mark Dobson:
So I've never ran a full-on strip-till bar when I do strip-till manure. So my family has a livestock, too. What I've always done is just RTK my manure with some kind of rig that plants it four to six inches deep, nothing crazy. And then, I come in behind it and build strips either later that fall, but typically in the spring because it's already got enough nitrogen in there that I don't want to overload that system. But typically, what I do is place it with RTK in the fall with regular manure equipment, whether that be... Oh, there's countless brands that make some kind of colder injection, Farmstar. It doesn't matter the name. But anyways, I place it with RTK, and then I come in the spring and make the strip. So the reason I like that system is then I can come in with 60 pounds of anhydrous, and then you don't have to side dress or anything. You just come in and now you're done for the year. So that's how we've done in the past.
And then, what I've always found through my research as well is you can get about 90% of the benefits of manure at about 50% of the rate, if that makes any sense. So a lot of guys go out and they just put on whatever the manure management plan to let them do the absolute most. Say they got 80 acres and they can put on 6,000 gallon, that's what they would do. I would probably be the guy that would put 2,000 gallons on as many acres as I could and then come back in and strip-till that with whatever wasn't in that blitz. What I do with the manure, we sample several times through the pump outs, and then I call it feathering in, but I feather in what was missing. So if it's not really high in phosphate, if it needs 30 more pounds of phosphate, I'll bring that in either with strip-till bar or planter.
If it's low on K, I'll run some potash, SOP. I run that on my organic farm because I lack some potassium, so I actually run sulfate of potash so I get both sulfur and potash, but I strip-till it as well. But I'm putting on the manure first like I said with RTK in 30-inch bands, and then I come in with the bar to make the berm later and then just put in whatever the manure didn't have. Everybody talks about having a yield bump from manure, and I do see that, but I would rather, like I said, put 2,000 gallon on several acres than 6,000 gallon on a few. I think you actually can take yourself backwards pretty fast because you have much higher nitrate levels in the soil. It gets into BOD loading and a bunch of science and stuff that I watch people's eyes glaze over when I start talking about, but you can take yield the other way pretty fast as well.
Noah Newman:
And so, you're applying the manure ahead of soybeans, ahead of corn, or does it not matter?
Mark Dobson:
So on my farm, everything because that's my real element, my only nutrient source per se. I will buy a little bit off farm, but anything that's involved with organic approved is not [inaudible 00:21:18] They are very, very proud of those nutrients. So I don't buy any more elements than I have to to grow to my yield goals.
Noah Newman:
And then, so the fertility that you're applying with the strip-till bar then is just to kind of supplement the manure?
Mark Dobson:
Yeah. I guess I would call it filling the gaps. So the manure may have a 51, 20, 35, make up a number, but you're going to be limited somewhere either by phosphate or by nitrogen or whatever. When it hits that number and they tell you what you can run, then I would fill in with strip-till what that didn't do.
Noah Newman:
I see. So then, in the spring, are you-
Mark Dobson:
So on my farm down, I have a 50-acre field that I already talked to the neighbor that'll get some manure this fall. It will not get the full whatever, 50, 100, or whatever gallons. It'll probably get 3,000, and then I will still put on anhydrous in the spring. And then, out of all the rig testing I've done, like I said, my family raises livestock too, I can get the yield bump from manure from that lesser rate, but I get the consistency of yield from commercial products, especially on the nitrogen side. I do not see as good as yields typically on farms where they use nothing but manure. I see issues. I would rather them pull back so you have 50 to 75 units and you can get from somewhere else.
Noah Newman:
I see. And then, what about cover crops? Are you using those in all your acres?
Mark Dobson:
Yes. Last year was the first year, but 100% of my acres had something growing on them in the winter. So a third of my organic has wheat growing on it as a crop, so it's not a cover crop, but I do intercede a clover crop into my wheat via frost seeding in February. So even when the wheat comes out, there's already a crop growing underneath it. So I'm trying to keep stuff going all the time. And then, not that I didn't have enough irons in the fire, I also got a Yield 360 RAIN machine this year.
Noah Newman:
Oh, no kidding.
Mark Dobson:
So I'm doing part of my nutrients with it now, so that kind of changes my organic world. And I think in the future, I will be able to seed cover crops with it during the season, so all my crops will have something growing when I'm done. So I don't know where that's headed for sure, but it sounds like potentially in the future, it will have capabilities of that.
Noah Newman:
Well, you're doing a little bit of everything, the 360 unit, the RAIN unit, for people not familiar with it, kind of go over that.
Mark Dobson:
Yeah. So I guess it is new enough probably a lot of... I've seen it in more magazines and more YouTube-type farms that have the machine. So it is a autonomous, basically traveler. It just goes up and down the rows of the crop and can apply manure and water throughout the growing season. I did not get mine into the field till late this year, so I did not get to run it all season, but I did get to make some manure passes on my organic corn. It's kind of incredible to be able to have access to your field from the time you plant it until harvest with not just water but nutrients. It's going to make the research part of my head spin because there's so many different things that I want to try and do with that that I don't know where the end of that is or isn't. I think I will do some strip-till still just because of where my manure misses nutrient-wise. I will still apply that probably under the plant before we get started.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, how deep do you make your strips? Where are you applying the fertilizer?
Mark Dobson:
So a lot of it depends on whether it's mine or custom. I like to put my fertility down deep like deep as my tracker pole at eight to 10 inches typically on my own acres because I've ran controlled traffic since 2011, so I don't move much. I just move enough to miss the rootball, and I don't move across the whole soil profile. I use the same spot over and over and over and over again basically. Just shifting enough to keep the strip-till bar from plugging basically is all I do. So if soil test-wise, not that there's as much stratification issue in organic or organic in strip-till, but still a lot higher fertility up than I have down. So I have been running deeper on my farm to put a layer of fertility down as far as I can physically pull it and make sense.
We get much deeper than that and we get some pretty ugly clay layers and stuff, and I think the benefits go back the other way pretty fast when you look at how well nutrients are extracted and where the water's going to be. So I don't foresee going any deeper than that on my farm, but I do try to place them eight to 10 inches deep on my own acres. On the custom side, I pull the bar seven or eight, so not everything's going to make the bottom of the strip, so five to six inches. So for me, as long as you got three to four inches away from the seed, I don't see crop safety issues.
Noah Newman:
And let's burn a quick time-out to share a message from Yetter Farm Equipment. Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with residue management, fertilizer placement, and seedbed 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 stock 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.
Are you in the same spacing for corn and soybeans? Are you 30-inch rows or-
Mark Dobson:
I'm all 30, yeah. We may have to go narrower. We keep getting more weed issues, but if that happens, I'll probably build some kind of [inaudible 00:27:58] to still do them on 20s or something. I don't know what I'll do. I know there's a lot of guys that I've talked to via Facebook or X or AgTalk or whatever that have not seen the results I have on soybeans, but it's been pretty significant. We've had some right at 90 bushel. Field average is 87 and a half bushel beans in an area that does not have soil to create that. So a lot of it's got to be from fertility. Even though I was taught in college that beans respond to fertility and corn responds to fertilizer, I have seen beans respond quite well to sulfur and manganese on my own farm.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, you're pretty unique. I mean, you don't hear a ton about strip-tilling soybeans. I mean, it seems to be becoming more popular.
Mark Dobson:
No, but Alex changed my life because the guy down in Georgia raised, whatever, 17 bushel of beans. He strip-tills them twice.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, that's right.
Mark Dobson:
I mean, he made my day because we've been doing this. So 2008 is the very first time I strip-tilled beans, and the only reason was is back then, I had a rig that was ground drive, and honestly, it sounds crazy because you would think something that was just set constant would come out the same, but when they changed from white potash to red potash or they got in three new semis of MAP or DAP or whatever we were running, the bar didn't always come out right. So getting it done and being empty, you can do with a scale and a system that has a hydraulic drive. And when I first started we were ground drive. Sometimes you'd have 5 or 10 acres left, so we just did some fields go under beans, and it was like whoa. I remember we had some AMS in one of them, so like I said, extra sulfur, and it was like that was significant enough. We're going to try that again. And then, we did some haves of fields back probably '09 and '10, and then since 2011, I've always strip-tilled beans.
Noah Newman:
Wow. So it's kind of almost like an accidental experiment almost that-
Mark Dobson:
I think most of my life, the best things have been actually [inaudible 00:30:01] I would like to say that I have these well-thought-out beautiful plans that just absolutely hit a home run every time, but it's usually in the oopsies and things like that. Guys have messed up fertilizer mixes before, and you think it's going to be a big deal or whatever. It's like, "Well, we're just going to do it, and we'll see what happens." Sometimes it ends up not being a big deal at all. Sometimes you learn a lot there. You kind of think of the bell curve and studying, and you kind of study the 60% in the middle or whatever, and I've always learned a pile more from the outliers. If I get a spot in the field that's 50 bushel better than everything else, I want to know why. And if I have a spot that's dragging significantly, I want to know why. When everything's around the average, I don't learn a lot there.
Noah Newman:
Going back to the cover crops, so what species of cover crops are you using? How are you applying them? What kind of rates? What's your method to your madness?
Mark Dobson:
So part of mine goes through an air seeder. I built a 30-foot air seeder. I just took a John Deere rig and an old sprayer boom and put it on there and then it gets either vertical tilled or field cultivated in. So some of it gets done that way. That's how all my proceeding gets done is with the air seeder. The rest of it gets ran through a John Deere No-Till Drill put in the ground. I use rye ahead of my bean acres at a very high rate because of my organic, I'm using it as weed control, so two and a half to three bushel of rye. So I create quite a mat and sometimes I strip-till them into that and leave it grow and roll it for wheat control. And sometimes it doesn't survive the winter well enough, and it gets worked in, and we conventional farm. So it just depends.
And then, ahead of the corn is coming out of wheat, so there's already a clover crop on it. So I have clover growing ahead of my corn, obviously helps with some nitrogen contribution. And the reason I like what I would call a plant-based nitrogen source is just the timing of when it's available. I think it does a nice job of mineralizing becoming available at about the time corn reaches its peak demand.
Noah Newman:
So you typically make strips through the cover crops before you terminate them?
Mark Dobson:
I do make strips. It depends on how much they are behaving. Sometimes strips into cover crops can be a very big challenge in itself, but typically yes, I will make strips in them before I terminate them. So two years ago, I made strips in all the rye. I planted the crop, and then I actually terminated the cover crop, and the beans were third trifoliate. So I actually rolled the beans and the cover crop together, so beans don't seem to care. Some people told me to just do it that way, and they were trusted enough advisors that I said, "Okay, fine. I'm going to do hundred acres that way." And they're like, "Oh, I didn't know you meant all of them." "Oh, yeah. You said it works, so let's do it. Don't tell me I can do it if you didn't mean it." But no, anyways, actually yes, I terminated while the beans were six inches tall. That's how it worked out.
Noah Newman:
You're using a roller crimper. Did you build that yourself or-
Mark Dobson:
I did, yeah. Yep.
Noah Newman:
And that-
Mark Dobson:
I'm looking at maybe getting, John has their new NRO 1. I'm thinking about investing in one of them. Again, it goes back to capital. I started on my own five years ago, so not that capital is not the number one limiting thing for all farms, but it is when you're trying to reestablish. And in this organic thing, there's a lot of machinery involved. Unfortunately, all the new machinery is insanely expensive. I've kind of just built a lot of the stuff because financially, it made the most sense.
Noah Newman:
That's interesting you brought that up because I was going to ask you the biggest difference between a regular strip-till operation or organic strip-till operation. You'd probably need more than this interview to explain all that, right?
Mark Dobson:
Oh, right. And you know what? I don't even think I have the information to give you that interview because I've just gotten started doing it. So I've done two years worth of some trials and some strips on my farm, and the results have been really nice. And the thing is sometimes I wish I had a bar that all I did was place nutrients. And what I mean by that is we have gotten these things so nice that there is no residue in the strip. The strips are tall. The strips are beautiful. On some of my organic, all I care is that the nutrients are banded because I'm probably going to have to work it. You know what I mean?
If the germination works phenomenal and I can just come in with my flame weeder and then run a single sweep cultivator later underneath the residue, and that's the beautiful thing about that. On my beans, sometimes I still have to make a cultivator pass, but I use a single sweep rig that has a coulter in front of it, and I can literally still leave 80% of the risk. So it still would meet any residue requirements or HCL and everything else.
The problem is sometimes I can't do that. This spring, my rye, there's just pockets that didn't survive. The problem with organic is it's not like you can treat that 25% of the field different. It's got to be the same thing ever. So this year, I rolled under my rye with a high speed disc and still made strips. At that point, the bar really doesn't need to make perfect strips. It's more about nutrient placement. So organic's a whole other ball of wax. I mean, I would call it, in my infancy, I was spoiled in commercial farming. I was at my dad's hip from the time I could walk, so I had a lot of experience there and a lot of years putting that together. And then, like I said, since 2008, I've been working around strip-till and research with it. So the last couple of years is really all I have of just getting sun.
Noah Newman:
Now, what made you want to start getting into organic?
Mark Dobson:
So let's be honest first. First of all, it's the challenge. I kind of looked around it about it. We toured some farms when I was in college. It intrigued me. When I went into it, my number one goal was I didn't want people to be able to drive by my farm and know that I farm organically, and I wanted to raise at least county average yields. So a lot of it was the challenge. And then, my wife and I actually... There's some things about organic that are a little intriguing. I don't know that that's the farming practice in the future. I think there's going to be a modified system that falls somewhere between what we're doing now and no chemicals and everything else, but a lot of the chemicals don't work anymore anyways. So I don't know. I think it was just getting a jump on maybe some of that.
And then, I've learned more agronomically in the last five years in organic than I ever did before that in the industry because we just fixed anything that was wrong with a chemical and tried to do things there. And on an organic farm, you try to prevent everything you can. So weeds are basically indicator species, and if you have a certain weed, you learn how to not have those weeds. Instead of what can I spray to kill it, you learn how to eliminate it ever showing up, and it's made me far better as an agronomist for commercial side of things just because I feel like we Band-Aid a lot. And there's times that yes, maybe $50 every year for the rest of your life fixes it or maybe $200 once fixes it forever, and it's just a far different approach. You learn way more about each individual element and what having it or lacking it does in the soil.
Gypsum has helped me a ton. I spread it every year now because it keeps my soil, I call it, malleable but very workable. So when it comes to organic, obviously, you can't get soil flow. It's really hard to put dirt between corn plants to keep weeds from coming. So no, it's like I said, 10 years from now, our conversation will be far more in depth, and I feel like I'll probably have a lot greater grasp on how strip-till fits into that system. But I'm working on some trials and working with some people that at some point, not saying we may have perennial like things growing all the time, but I would like to get where I can just strip-till and plant a corn crop, and that's my program for my organic. I really have no desire to have to work the ground three to five times a year.
That's the biggest reason it keeps organics from growing. It's fighting a narrative where we're trying to get to doing less stuff and then that system... And like I said, I promote part of that system. I very much do, I have a lot of family that had a lot of health issues that all were in ag. I can't imagine anybody can say that we don't think we've caused some grief somehow through some of the products we've used. But at the same time, we can't say we're going to get away from using more energy and carbon and then say, "Well, strip-till, you're going to make seven passes a year." It would be nice to have a middle ground or a closer between the two extremes and say, "Well, yes. This does not work. Do that, but through strip-till maybe we can get it to three passes."
And like I said, at my beans, that's really where I was at. Two years ago, it worked phenomenal. Basically, rolling rye at a heavy rate has eliminated pigweed issues for me. It's the one weed that everybody else fights. I don't. It's just something that it was a complete wild card for me because I was not expecting that at all. When I started doing that, I was just hoping for any kind of weed suppression, and it was really more foxtail was what I find, in soybeans especially. So I was trying to get rid of it. It has not done that for me, but I just do not fight pigweed like everybody else does. So it was kind of neat to see some of these guys that are having a lot of issues.
Well, I know a lot of people look at cover crops as a weed or they look at it as another job or whatever, but some of these guys may want to look into that as an option because if you're going to spend 25 or $30 to try to kill pigweeds anyways, I mean, what's wrong with having something grown on your field and preventing some erosion, putting down a root mass, and over time could potentially benefit your soil? What's wrong with doing that instead of spending it all on the backside trying to get rid of something?
Noah Newman:
Yeah, that's a big eye-opener about the pigweed. When-
Mark Dobson:
It really is.
Noah Newman:
When did you start organic? Was that 2000-
Mark Dobson:
Basically, five years ago, 2019.
Noah Newman:
Five years ago. Okay.
Mark Dobson:
I wasn't organic then. I was in the transition process. Well, I'm in organic two years, relatively new.
Noah Newman:
Before you strip-tilled, were you guys no-till, conventional, or-
Mark Dobson:
So we no-till all our beans, and we no-till part of our corn. So anything that they would allow us to work, we did because, I know everybody has different opinions there and guys have different results, we could not get the same yields in our no-till corn that we could in our grounds we worked. So that's why I guess strip-till was so appealing to my dad's operation especially was now we're going to burn basically the same amount of fuel and more or less the same time or a little bit longer and just do it in one pass because we couldn't hide or something anyways. So you're already out there doing the job. It's just you bought the technology to drive straight, and now, you have a row cleaner. So it wasn't a big deal. My first bar literally was just a 3250 DMI on a caddy. Back then, it was pneumatic, so it was the predecessor to the Gen I Montag.
Actually, I just sent this old fiberglass rig to Montag, and they were kind enough to weld a hydraulic mount on it or mount for a hydraulic pump and everything on it. And that's what I ran for the first five years was a very, very, very old dry box that was just on a, like I said, just a regular anhydrous bar that just had row cleaners, and that's what we stripped it with. So no, the reason we did it, like I said, just we could not get the yields on our true no-till that we could if we... And we never worked the ground deep. I mean, we basically almost see the shovels on our field cultivator or field finisher. It was just enough of a pass to open things up a little bit and went there.
And then beans, like I said, we probably would've never changed anything there except we did some trials, and it showed up. And there's years that we didn't. We just went in and planted right next to the old corn stalks, whatever, five inches away, just enough to not hit them with the row cleaners and took advantage of the extra fertility that was there from the corn, but still no till. Like I said, we live in an area where there's quite a bit of highly erodible ground, and having residue is nice, so not... Like I said, if I was farming 1,500 acres here, I probably wouldn't strip-till every acre. There'd be shields that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it just because of the lay of the land, but there's farms that, in my opinion, don't make me farm at all.
We got to be cool and put fences back in because cattle are worth money, so some ground doesn't need to see row crop. I'm probably the only guy I know that I got a lot of flack about it, but I ran into some grounds. Oh, I've had it 14 years, and five of the last seven years, it was in [inaudible 00:43:46] but some ground just doesn't need to be intensely farmed all the time. It's just not what it's designed to do.
Noah Newman:
Now, you have livestock, you said?
Mark Dobson:
I don't.
Noah Newman:
Oh, you don't. Okay.
Mark Dobson:
I mean, I do, but I don't. There's two hog barns on the farm that I'm on that I don't do anything with them. Somebody takes care of them, and I take care of the manure.
Noah Newman:
Right. Good deal.
Mark Dobson:
I had the cattle my entire life until when I left my family's farm in 2018. So I was married to the farm. I happened to marry somebody that likes to travel a lot, so I built a relationship with a guy that was a class below me in school. He has a lot of livestock and does not have enough pasture, so part of my cover crops becomes forage, so I let him take a cutting of my clover. Between it and the straw that's left in it makes really nice feed for his cattle, and then it looks, unless something disrupts the ball rolling, I'm bringing his cattle to my farm next year. So we will have livestock on my farm. They just won't be mine.
Noah Newman:
Yeah.
Mark Dobson:
Which I think is perfect because he doesn't want to buy more land, and if he can pattern graze after my wheat and the manure is here and my certifier's fine with that, they don't care as long as they're here eating my stuff, it doesn't matter that they're commercial cattle. So I've got it all set up and approved on that end. But no, the long-term goal is I think everybody benefits to having livestock on their farm. The problem is how you logistically make that work in today's world. I don't know. Unless you were already doing it for me, it's pretty hard to think about building a cattle building and doing all that because it would pull so much capital from the machinery base I'm still trying to create.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. Going over some more details with your equipment, so is your strip-till bar and your planter, are those both still 12 rows?
Mark Dobson:
So believe it or not, I strip 12, and I plant 16. So I have not found that to be as much of a challenge as some. I know a lot of people struggle with guess rows and stuff like that. I have not seen that be an issue for me.
Noah Newman:
And then, what kind of planter do you have and what are some of the bells and whistles on it?
Mark Dobson:
So actually, believe it or not, I have a 1230 stack-fold Case IH, so three-point planter makes cultivating a really nice life. So I run a 1230 Case IH planter, and then it has row shutoffs and good row cleaners and everything else. There's really nothing super crazy. I don't have electric drives or anything like that. It's just hydraulically driven, so I do all variable rate population. So I guess it's still, for a lot of this area, still, I guess, sophisticated, but it's not as crazy as I've owned in the past. I had a multi-hybrid precision planter when I was with my dad.
Noah Newman:
How does the variable rate planting, how does that work? Was that a pretty big learning curve when you started doing that?
Mark Dobson:
It was. So it's a lot of learning blocks. So I used to just put them in fields so whoever was running the planter didn't have to think about shutting off the prescription or whatever. So we just put in what I call learning blocks, and a lot of times, it was just the field average place in different areas around the field in, what I would call, zones. Typically, I'm at as few as three as much as seven, what I call, similar zones in a field, and it was just kind of learning. If I take this area that struggles backwards, how far can I take it backwards before the field average that we used to plan starts looking better? And what I found is there's not a lot of upswing. That sounds weird, but we used to plant 30 to 32,000. It was pretty common. I don't find a lot of bushels higher than that where we live.
I don't get a lot of return on a lot of extra bushels. There are a few spots where some of my tile mains go and some waterways that never dry out. I'll plant 38 or 40,000, and I can continue to get some kind of return on my seed investment. But typically, I go the other way. A lot of my fields only average 27 or 28,000 total population. The best areas will probably be 34,000, and I go as low as 22,000 on my clay hills and some of my struggle areas. I actually walked some the other day and pulled some ears, and we were insanely blessed this year with timely rainfall, and what I call my worst zone is going to be probably 200 to 220 bushel of corn. So coefficient of variance wise, those areas are going to be very interesting because it's probably areas that long-term typically would have about a 110 to 120 in a five-year kind of average. Making 220 bushel of corn, that's pretty significant. I wish I could make my flats double their corn return.
So no, there was a big learning curve, but it was basically the willingness to go less because all you hear from the seed industry is seed, seed, seed, seed, seeds. And my problem was I traveled to Husker Harvest Days one year, and I got to talk to some farmers out there that I've met over the years through online and some other stuff. And I got to talk with them, and when you find out they plant in a dry land at 12,000, it's like why is there such a divide? Where I live in Iowa, we don't have the rich black soil as the Des Moines Lobe. We kind of really more mimic Missouri type soils. It's like why are they planting 12,000, and we're supposed to plant everything at 30,000? That just never made sense to me. It was just way too much of a divide. So I just kept pulling back on them until I felt like we were giving something up.
I did not find where the yield was giving up, so I pulled back to 18 and 16,000 and could yield right with the corn around it at higher populations. What I did start to find was weed control issues. So late season, that was too much light in the canopy, and we started losing yield to weed control more so than necessarily populations. So no, there was a giant learning curve to that. We started, I think, in 2005. This was the first hydraulic drive I bought for a planter. Like I said, a lot of my stuff is learning blocks, and my poor dad over the years, I'm sure, has been miserable more than once when I tell him what I'm going to do, or usually, it's when I show him what I did because my brother planted most of the stuff, and my dad probably didn't find out a lot about trials until they were already in the field and growing. But he was always a pretty good sport about letting me learn and do some stuff.
But no, that's the hardest part with anything. I could tell you a million things. I was just reading the other day. Is it Chris Perkins-
Noah Newman:
Yep, Chris Perkins.
Mark Dobson:
... that you guys just got an article on? I can't ever remember for sure. I have three different Perkins that I talk to quite often. They're all C's, so I wonder. But anyways, it's like him. I love the part of the article when he was like, "But this is what works here, so it's not like you can call me and I gave you all my secrets and like boom." "Oh, I didn't have 300 bushel of corn. You're a liar." Well, I don't know because I don't know your farm, and I haven't been there. You know, I saw parts of my farm that I can tell on yield maps that were pig lots 70 years ago. You know what I mean? There's so many things that play into it in history, and obviously, we're just now opening the jar or Pandora's box of biology. There's so much we don't know. But what I struggle with guys is...
And like I said, that's why I was so blessed to have the family I did. We tried things, and most people don't. And I can tell guys, "Hey, I cut back on fertilizer, and it works well." I end a lot of my conversations and a lot of my posts with the same thing, "Your mileage may vary. I don't know what it's going to do on your farm, but I know if you never try, you're probably never going to know either."
I guess that's what I'm getting at is with today's data collection, even if you don't want to do it, I mean, almost everybody has very nice planters. Mainstream ag has very nice planters, has access to do the things I'm doing, have combines and record everything. Even if you don't have a clue what all that means, work with somebody that... Like I said, I put in learning blocks for guys. That just means I may have a four-acre square somewhere in their field that is everything they would've always done. And then, we do other stuff around the rest of the field, and we just compare and see how it works, or we'll do half a field, whatever they're comfortable with.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, you hear a lot of the... Even the high yielding guys talk about you can't know what you don't measure, so-
Mark Dobson:
Right. And what's beautiful is strip-tillers... For me, this is the number one thing I love about strip-till. How do you go out with a fertilizer rig on 90-foot paths at 16 miles an hour and do fertilizer trials when you have to rely on the machine overlapping to create the rest of fertilizer? How do you do side-by-side? It's the greatest thing ever in strip-till. We can literally side-by-side. We just go in and do half the field and then switch to the other fertilizer and do half the field, or that's how I used to do it. Now, it's even easier. I just switch from tank one to tank two when I turn around, and I can strip-till the field as I go across the field.
But I used to do a lot of trials where I would strip the field 50/50, and that's how we harvest, and that's where a lot of the information came from. And then, the problem for them is I don't usually ask guys until I've done it two or three years because you may, the first time, be like, "Oh my God, this was 22 bushel. We're doing this," and the next year, maybe three. It may only pay for itself, and then you're like, "Ooh, let's do it year three and see where it lands." It may only be eight bushel total average over three years. Well, that's still worth doing then. Some people are Beck's lovers. Some of them are haters. That's one thing I like about Beck's as a company and their Proven stuff. When they come out with stuff called Proven, they show them that it's long-term data.
Well, if you're going to go over one or two years, you're probably not going to know. And there's some things that showed up so well that the next time was just as well, and that's a new practice. And then, there's a lot of stuff I've done like I said. It'll show, but I don't think you need to drown yourself in data, but I do think it's nice to have good soil test. And this may be the only part of me that's a control freak because I really don't mind letting a lot of people do stuff for me, but I take all my own soil tests and always have. I'm very, very picky when it comes to that, and I need to know that that information was good.
Noah Newman:
Do you take your soil samples from right in the strip or how does that work?
Mark Dobson:
I guess I do it different than most. I work with Midwest Labs out at Omaha. I think they're a tremendous company. I actually toured their facility. They have a really nice comprehensive guide on how to soil sample, and they want you to do it at a ratio. I've never done it that way. I always just sample... I sample the middles and the bands at every single location I have, and then I have two full samples for the field. And then, I just do composites for pH to oversee it, even though I have pH in both of those. But if I need a manure management plan, I just do it on 10 acres for them to have their information. But typically, I want to know what's in the band and what's not because I use the same spot over and over and over and over again. I hear guys say all the time, "Well, I don't want to do that because I don't want to create a hot spot of fertility."
For what reason do you not want to create a hot spot of fertility? I don't think I need to fertilize my whole field like 60%, and you'll take the crop and go through a crop removal tool. Very little, 40 to 50% of what a plant brings up is leaving that field. I mean, I tell people all the time, "Make sure your combine covers the whole pass because your combine's a spreader truck. You spread more potash with your combine than they do with spreader trucks." So I don't worry as much about the fertility side of it that way. And then, like I said, I just do in the band and in the centers. Then, I have an idea of where it is in the middle, and I have an idea of where my band is, and what's nice is my bands are usually 30 to 60 parts for me and higher in K.
They really aren't much different in P most years, which is funny because that's the one we want to say is so important and crucial to band. But mine will be four to six parts remain higher on a P1, so not massively significant, but my K is higher, and I can't build K where I live. We just can't. So for me to have K, going to control traffic was the only way I ever was able to keep potassium high in my tissue samples in either corn or soybeans. As soon as I hit reproductive in either one, I could never keep my K levels in anywhere close to an optimum level. And when I went to control traffic after a couple of years, I don't struggle with that anymore.
Noah Newman:
Interesting.
Mark Dobson:
That to me is crucial. But now, you have a bigger band, and you're overloading the system as I call it. So you only have so many seats at the table when it comes to [inaudible 00:56:47] Well, the nice thing is K overload the system. You have access to K. K is the one thing as soon as it's wet and mobile can go directly in the plant. There's no soil processes. There is no waiting for it. It can just go from being potash to being planted with some rainfall and definitely need moisture. That's one thing we do lack sometimes. But no, it's just nice to see that I could build it a little bit higher so that in that region, there is a higher percentage of it available.
Noah Newman:
Well, I know it's a busy time of year, so I'll just leave you with this. As you head into harvest season now, what would you say is one big takeaway from the 2024 growing season? Any big eye-openers out there?
Mark Dobson:
So I travel a lot. Unfortunately, the biggest eye-opener for me was how region-specific and how interesting the weather was in 2024. Traveled a lot to places that normally I would be envious of their crops that just got pounded with rain this year. It was kind of hard to watch. I guess I don't make a very good farmer because I don't really want anybody to have a crop failure, but just how important weather was this year. So where we're at, weather, I guess, to me translates to planting day. The guys that planted early this year or planted in the Mother's Day timeframe are raising probably as good as crops as some of them have ever [inaudible 00:58:22] As you move the planting date back, we had some dry weather finally in September, and some of them later crops died faster than they should have. And so, for my region this year, the big takeaway for me was kind of what it's been most of my life, but having your fields ready and being able to plant early was crucial.
Noah Newman:
And now, wrap things up, big thanks to Mark Dobson for joining us on this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast. Thanks to Yetter Farm Equipment for sponsoring and making the series possible, and thank you so much for tuning in as always. Until next time, for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. I'm Noah Newman. Have a great day.
