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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter, University of Illinois soil scientist Andrew Margenot shares key takeaways from his long-term phosphorous (P) studies.
Margenot’s research group focuses on everything from NPK recommended rates, soil test values, removal rates and more. He’s currently leading the charge on a project to analyze thousands of soil samples dating back to the late 1800s — the largest soil samples archive in the world.
Margenot talks about the significance of the project, why strip-tillers should take a multi-year approach to P use efficiency, the fate of nitrogen (N) in MAP and DAP applications and new ways to maximize P uptake. He also touches on horizontal vs. vertical stratification, nutrient management strategies for 2025, and takes us behind the scenes of a meeting he attended with the EPA to discuss why farmers are being unfairly blamed for P losses.
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The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.
Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with solutions since 1930. Today, Yetter is your answer for finding the tools and equipment you need to face today’s production agriculture demands. The Yetter lineup includes a wide range of planter attachments for different planting conditions, several equipment options for fertilizer placement, and products that meet harvest-time challenges. Yetter delivers a return on investment and equipment that meets your needs and maximizes inputs. Visit them at yetterco.com.
Full Transcript
Noah Newman:
Hello and welcome to another edition of the Strip Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Yetter. I'm your host technology editor, Noah Newman. We've got a fun episode planned today. We're sharing some of the best stuff our microphones captured at the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa, where I walked around 16,000 steps a day, tired, just thinking about it in that 90 degree weather. First up, an exclusive interview with Schlegel Manufacturing's, Jonathan Spence and Leesburg Georgia Strip Tiller Alex Harrell, who used a Schlegel rapid till to achieve a record-breaking 218 bushel soybean yield. First of all, how far back do you guys go? How long have you guys known each other and how did you first get involved with Schlegel and Jonathan here?
Jonathan:
Facebook man.
Alex:
Yeah, Facebook saw a video on a farming page on Facebook and then a guy from Georgia was the one running it and I reached out to him and he got me in touch with Jonathan and I guess that's been two and a half, three years ago now.
Jonathan:
That's right, yeah.
Alex:
We ran it two seasons.
Noah Newman:
And then Jonathan, how'd you kind of figure out that Schlegel would be a good fit for what Alex was trying to do?
Jonathan:
Originally what we found was that Alex had a 16 row machine that he had had an accident with and ripped one of the wings off. So we started talking about a rapid till and the weight of that machine and how it was similar to the weight of the machine he had before. And then we started talking about possibly having a lighter weight machine and that's what we moved to with the standard rapid till instead of the HD. So it's kind of a win-win for us to be able to put him in a lighter machine that would do a better job of creating that seat fixed work.
Noah Newman:
And again, either one of you can answer this, but what is it about the rapid till that kind of gives you that winning edge when it comes to strip till?
Jonathan:
Well, in my opinion, I'd say it's two-fold and Alex can jump in if he wants to, but the biggest part is being able to run in the cover crops that he plants. He plants some chest high stuff and we took it over for a demo and we were able to see that run and clean out really well and not plug up and be able to run in that condition. And the second thing would be the seat bed. We make a really nice seat bed. Alex rips deep rips in front of our machine with a sub-soil type machine. So really the bed rip is what he gets out of this and he also applies fertilizer with it as he [inaudible 00:02:28].
Noah Newman:
Strip till, is that fairly common where you are or are you pretty much a pioneer when it comes to that?
Alex:
No, no. There's some strip till around us. There's not much cover crop. It's a lot of just burned down winter weeds and strip into it and plant it in the next spring, but we're one of the first to do cover crops, yeah.
Noah Newman:
What was your reaction when you heard about... You had the soybean record last year and then 218 bushels this year?
Jonathan:
Oh well first thing I sent Alex a text and said, please tell me you ran our machine [inaudible 00:02:56]. And he did, so it was fantastic. I had no doubt this time, I mean we saw what he did last year and we were confident it would be the same this year and whether he wins or not next year you're still going to try hard. That's the thing I admire Alex for his ability to keep on pushing that and trying harder.
Noah Newman:
How much of a staple is a combination of strip-till and cover crops going to be for you moving forward?
Alex:
Yeah, probably 95% of our acres every year are cover crops unless we need to do some dirt moving or dirt work or something. We cover crop every acre and then we strip till into those covers every spring as well. But we put cover every September, October, November, we plant cover on it. Basically every acre we have unless we have to do some dirt work.
Noah Newman:
And then talk about your method of how you build the strips through the cover crops. Are you terminating the cover crops first and then...
Alex:
Yeah, yeah, we terminate the cover crop two to four weeks before we go through and then we just go through and that good dead cover, it just moves right out of the way. Makes it crispy.
Noah Newman:
And again, some of the top takeaways from the high-yielding plot, what would you say those are this year?
Alex:
Where the cover crop helps us on that is obviously soil health, but the main reason we use that is for erosion. We get a lot of heavy winter rains and the cover crop helps us with any roll that we have that would typically wash away, the cover crop holds it together. And then when we pair that with the strip-till rig, we don't have to destroy that cover. It'll hold in place until the cash crop grows up and has a root system where it'll prevent the erosion.
Noah Newman:
When you tell people about the Schlegel Rapid-Till, how often do you bring up Alex's story and how it helps him on his farm?
Jonathan:
Yeah, we have used it a lot more recently than we did last year because it's really obvious when you get back-to-back world championships that something's right. So the first time we used it as much as we could, but we've really started leaning in on it now. We've seen a pattern developed from that.
Noah Newman:
Any top takeaways from a farm progress show this year? Anything that catches your eye out there or...
Jonathan:
There's the Tractor Kid.
Alex:
Yeah, I got to meet him. No, a lot of equipment out there, a lot of good options but like I said, just find somebody you trust and want to work with and [inaudible 00:05:16] I'd go with.
Noah Newman:
And I've seen a lot of people obviously talking to you over the past couple of days. How often does the topic of strip-till and cover crops come up in those conversations? They want to know about it?
Alex:
Not very often. Most of them want to know what the silver bullet is, which there's not one, but. You'll have a few guys come up. A lot of no-till guys come up from the Midwest and they want to ask about strips versus no-till. So no-till is kind of we can't do that in the south with our low CC soils, but a lot of them are wanting to compare no-till to strip-till, where we were comparing conventional till to strip-till.
Noah Newman:
Thanks to Jonathan and Alex for taking the time to talk with us there. Next up, the new kids on the block, Black Eagle Lag debuted its heavy-duty tool bar designed to hold up in tough conditions. President Doug Hayes gives us the scoop.
Speaker 4:
We're standing in front of our new 40 foot 16 row strip-till bar. We call it our narrow transport bar because this all was developed with the help of our partner down in Australia. He works farms in the Tablelands, works in some really tough conditions, does a lot of custom work all over the Australia and so the concept of building heavy-duty stuff that lasts is kind of the basis of it, but he's been involved in strip-till for a long time, so have I. and so this bar was originally prototyped in Australia. It was a dual-purpose planter bar and strip-till bar, so it was a pretty lightweight bar, so it was a good test for it. So we threw row units on it, he put about 2000 acres through the thing and then we brought that design back up here, beefed it up some, so it'll have made it a much heavier-duty robust narrower system than we think anybody else has in the marketplace.
We're using a lot thicker material than most everyone. The joints were designed so that we front fold and then fold up. One of the unique things is we have an air latch system for safety, so the system comes up, locks in, and then you lift it, comes down so you don't have to get out of the tractor to do anything. The double seven by seven framing adds a lot of structural rigidity to the system. We have wing flex, hydraulic down pressure on the wings all controlled by a central hydraulic block that works the whole system. So you really only have two hoses for that and it allows us to do multi-functions within the system. As far as the way we lift, it gull wings.
So when you come to the end, the function picks it up. It picks it up perpendicular from any angle that it's in and again, it's built heavy as heck. And then we've had the row unit out for a few years now, made some modifications to that. We have air cylinders on our containment arms as well as our row cleaner. Our air cylinder system is designed to provide down pressure, up pressure or pressure to both sides so that it allows suspension and so it's very dialable to what conditions you're running in.
You get into some sand, you got to lift it up, you get into harder issues, just very, very robust. We work with Montag for the carts. We don't make our own cart and they're a great company to work with and part of it starts just right at the row cleaner. It's a much more robust heavy duty, the larger blades turn at a slower rate. They do a really good job on the angles that we created in there to actually rip residue apart, followed up with a prescription tillage technology center cutter blade. So if any residue does escape that's getting it cut effectively, does a little fracturing before the shank.
We run a hydraulic trip on the row unit shank, that way we can maintain the proper angle of attack in the system. Runs through the accumulator system. Again, our containment arms, our air assist as well, so you can do the same thing. They'll lift up high to clear a plug if you happen to plug up something and then we finish it in the process of being patented closing wheel system. So it's all just heavy duty throughout. There hasn't been anybody that hasn't said this is a beast. There's not a lot in the United States right now. Most of it's in Australia. We're just this 16 row system. We're just debuting it here at the Farm show. So we've got some interest and hope to have a bunch of them running this fall.
Noah Newman:
All right, now let's head over to the environmental tillage systems booth where regional sales rep Dave Cinder explains how some strip tillers are using their soil warrior, not just to make strips but to also plant soybeans and cover crops.
Speaker 5:
Versatility is I guess one of the biggest things that we offer and bring to the table. Cover crops now heading into fall is definitely a consideration, especially on some of these crops you might be harvesting early on, primarily in the northern latitudes as well where you can get out there and do your tillage, your strip tillage, put your fertilizer placement in and apply cover crops between the rows. So as different programs have been coming available regarding cover crops and our machine having the ability to do that, we're seeing quite a few more growers adopt that technology with their soil warriors. Yeah, back to the soybean side of things, they're again getting more growers to adopt that. We've been doing tests now for a handful of years and we're seeing very positive results from that, really yields that are rivaling other methods of planting your beans.
Nice thing with that is you're reducing passes, you're doing your planting pass if you will on your soybeans at the same time. And we're starting to see growers that are actually putting some nutrients in with their soybeans when they're planting it and they're starting to see some yield response in some cases. So I mean we really look at it and approach it as a standpoint of the soybean is fertilizer I guess for lack of better terms. There are a few adjustments we have to make on the machine as far as fine tuning the way we pitch the fertilizer tubes and so forth to direct the seed to get it more of the depth that you want to be planting it at. But in a nutshell, yeah, you're applying it like that. You're metering it out just like you would with fertilizer. So even the things like the variable rate applications and things go like we already do with our fertilizers, you can do with your soybeans.
So the first thing I always recommend is the maintenance and the preparation side of things, that's saying, I won't go into detail, but prior planting is definitely a good thing. So making sure that your machine is ready, your fertilizer system's been cleaned out hopefully from spraying, but just make sure everything is running, make sure you've done your maintenance on it. That'll be for a lot more seamless transition and running in fall and really eliminate or reduce any of your downtime. As far as conditions go, I would say this year it's probably going to be in most areas pretty wet. So with our machine in particular, we have the abilities on depending on row unit types, you've got the ability to run shanks or coulters with it being really wet. If that trend continues for this fall, it might be more of a coulter type of situation. But yeah, again, preparation is huge.
Even things like software that actually trips some guys up this spring. Make sure your software on your guidance and your different, even your controllers and so forth, make sure those are up to date. You can lose some time in some cases, several hours depending on what kind of system you're running and so forth. So all those little details, I think a lot of times we kind of forget about those things, but you definitely need to stay up on them and it makes fall a lot more seamless.
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 seed bed preparation solutions since 1930. Today Yetter is your answer for success in the face of ever-changing production agriculture challenges. Yetter offers a full lineup of planter attachments designed to perform in varying planting conditions, multiple options for precision fertilizer placement, strip till units and 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. Let's swing by the Vary Technologies tent, one of my favorite places at the show because you get to see all the cutting-edge innovations on display, including this Redicop SCU weed seed control unit. Eric Schuller explains how it could be a game changer for your weed management.
Eric Schuller:
Noah. Hey, thanks. Here at Farm Progress 2024, Redicop Manufacturing. My name's Eric Schuller, I'm the USA business development manager for Redicop and we've got some exciting new technology we've got on display here. This technology is really focused on weed management, so whether a guy's got resistant weeds, whether it's Palmer amaranth, whether it's any sort of weed pressure that's in the field, what we've got is something that instead of the combine redistributing those weeds back into the field, now we have the ability to kill those weeds as the combine goes through the field. So it's a new tool in the toolbox to destroy weed seeds and also destroy any volunteer crop to keep fields clean from when that combine goes to the field in the fall all the way up until the spring. So what this technology is is a seed control unit. So we call this the SCU and what it does is it mounts underneath a combine chopper in conjunction with the chopper is going to process all the chaff that falls into the machine and it's got a very high kill rate of that chaff material.
So again, we're focused on killing weed seeds and any other volunteer crop that falls that's not in the grain tank that falls off the sieves and that material gets processed by the SCU. So let's just take a quick look at how this works. So as the combine goes to the field, the cab is going to be this direction and then this is going to be the back side of the combine. So as the sieves process that material, it's gravity fed into the hopper that you see here, and these are going to be spinning at about 2,800 RPM to 3000 rpm. So it's a very high horsepower machine, but what it does is guides those seeds into the set of rotors and stators and it's going to crack the seed, damage the seed basically destroy any germination of that material that way it's a clean field that's left after that combine goes to the field.
So it's a very simple product, but it's also a very effective product. And so we're getting a lot of questions and interest on growers that are maybe non-GMO type operation growers, that are organic type operation. And we've even sold these into farms that are our traditional corn and soybean that use traditional herbicide programs, whether a two-pass soybean operation or whatever. So very exciting new technology that we've got. It's new enough to where we do supply this to Deere Corporate. So on John Deere 780's and 790's as well as the X9 machine. It's a factory option, but it's a dealer installed kit on those combines. But if guys aren't John Deere customers on their combine, we do have kits available for any color, any brand of any class, seven, eight and nine combine of the last 10 years. So we've got options for adding this technology aftermarket as well as a factory option with John Deere. Any farm, any tillage type system, whether it's no-till, strip till, conventional till.
We are again really focused on having another tool or another option to manage the weed seed pressures that are in those fields, particularly if there's known herbicide resistances of those weed seeds. So what that does is makes the herbicide program more efficient. Guys really don't have to be as creative with their herbicide program next year because this maintains the efficacy of that herbicide program.
Noah Newman:
Good stuff there from Eric Schuller. Moving on, let's check in with Lynx owner, Lance Glenn Denning for a look at the company's new 36 row bar and a conversation about the latest strip till trends.
Lance Glenn Denning:
My name is Lance Glenn Denning. I'm the owner of Lynx Manufacturing and we brought this year to the farm progress show, our new 36 row 22 inch bar. This one's going up to North Dakota, going to also be running some makers in Canada, but guys doing sugar beets and corn is where the 22 inch market typically is. We also are bringing our new mainframe, which is carrying a 24 ton box split bin, so it's 60 40 split. We've got auto grease kits on these, that's the first year we're doing that. So every pivot point is greased instead of running poly bushings or something that's going to wear out. We're running a hardened bushing with a grease zerk on each one, that's all being run by the auto greaser, so keeps it simple. It's got a pretty narrow folding width of 17 and a half feet. Again, yeah, the 24 ton box, so that's a whole semi load.
[inaudible 00:19:57] it's more durable than most out there. Most of our customer base are going through that eight to 12,000 acre range every season, so it's more built for the commercial market. So as we see strip till growing, we're going to see more and more commercial people moving into it, commercial farmers. Less and less of just the 500 acre guys doing it and more of the larger farmers. So we see that market growing, especially with the [inaudible 00:20:20] program coming out, the federal government's pushing strip till more so we think that this is a huge opportunity for custom guys and commercial guys to start jumping in and making it equitable, so. Durability is the main thing and then also just refining mounds.
When we started out in strip till, we weren't running row cleaners, we weren't running rolling baskets. Early on, 20 years ago strip till was mostly injecting fertilizer and dry fertilizer instead of just anhydrous and then trying to plant into it and we were competing with like a DMI or that, well now we're trying to completely refine that strip and make it a really nice seed bed so it's better than what a field cultivator would leave.
So the market has just changed there a little bit, looking for more of a finished product and also looking for something that's a complete product. We started out just building toolbars and we realized that people wanted the toolbar, the row unit and the box all to come from the same company, so there wasn't a blame game as to who was responsible if something didn't work.
So complete systems are where most of the market is right now it seems like, and that's definitely been a change. We got a shank for the fall, you can also run the shank in the spring, but most people will switch over and run coulters in the spring so you can remove the shank and put a coulter unit in there too, so. Residue management's always important as you're trying to get stocks to break down for the next year. Strip till, I think if you're leaving that residue about that tall, it goes through corn on corn better. If we chop her down to two small pieces sometimes as the fluff gets in between the rows, makes it kind of hard to keep it off the rows coming into spring. But yeah, if you're struggling with corn on corn situations of that, certainly we'd love to talk to you and get you into something that manages residue better.
Noah Newman:
And of course there were tons of fan favorites on display from companies like Kuhn, Kraus, Land Lover, Unverfirth, Volgan, Yetter, Zimmerman, and much, much more. Kurt Davis from Kuhn Kraus, Andy Unverfirth from Unverfirth and Andy Thompson from Yetter give us a look at what's new for 2025.
Kurt Davis:
Hi, my name's Kurt Davis, director of marketing and product management with Kuhn Kraus. Talking today a little bit about strip till with the ST-PRO II Row unit. The ST-PRO II Row unit features a 24 inch coulter at the front of the machine independently mounted along with floating row cleaners that move that residue out of the way once it's been cut by that big coulter. Those move independently of the rest of the row frame that has the shank attached where we can easily adjust that shank up or down in the range of six to 12 inches. We also have the ability to make quick adjustments with the row unit angling blades for building berms, but also we definitely have the ability to adjust fertilizer independent of the shank depth of the machine. A unique feature with liquid or dry fertilizer that's available on the Gladiator.
But one of the things that customers like most about the machine is just the ease of adjustment, how easy it is to adjust the angle of the blades and adjust position of the floating mechanism of these blades. That's one of the features that customers really like ease of adjustment and no daily maintenance. There's no grease zerks on the row unit. We use polylube bushings in a lot of the pivot areas and that really keeps customers operating on a continuous basis. One of the new features that we have is the air diffuser for dry fertilizer with the new stainless steel tube that supports all of this mechanism and then also integrates the blockage sensor, the wireless blockage sensor that we have to notify customers if there's ever a blockage in the flow of the dry fertilizer. This top tube then releases the exhaust and pushes the dust and exhaust back down to the top of the strip and then finally the striker conditioning reel conditions that reel, conforms to the berm and really sets up a good condition for seed bed.
So the Gladiator is available in a lot of different configurations from pull type to three point with dry fertilizer like the nine ton twin bin system that we utilize from Montag, gives you a lot of variable rate control. Two different products applied at the same time and we do have liquid systems available as well for the Gladiator for different types of fertilizers. We can put down dry liquid or even anhydrous and two products simultaneously if needed. There's a lot of debate on whether strip till is done in the fall or spring, but what we find a lot of times is shank machines typically run in the fall where there's a high clay content and that really sets up the best case scenario for fall time application and applying fertilizer and creating strips in the fall.
Sometimes when you get into situations where there's more sandy soil, you do have the flexibility of doing some strips in the spring time of the year, but ultimately the thing you want to do is maintain a good seed bed and strip and make sure you have a good berm height. That's something that the Gladiator does extremely well, but then be able to apply that fertilizer and even do some rate reduction and that's a big cost and impact on the economics of the farm to be able to reduce one of the biggest input costs for the farming operation. For more information on the Gladiator or the other strip till systems, please visit us at Kuhn.com.
Andy Unverferth:
My name is Andy Unverferth and I'm the director of marketing for Unverferth Manufacturing and today we're taking a look at our new Raptor strip tillage row units. These are the TerrainPro2 row units and we made some really nice enhancements to get better performance in varying soils in the field. So to start off, the row unit itself is lighter, so a lighter row unit across the entire machine and then we start up front with our new row cleaners. So we have a shark two style row cleaner to help clear residue from the strip and then the backbone to the Raptor row unit is our depth gauge wheel. So each row unit rides independently on that depth gauge wheel and we have a new solid steel design and that allows each row unit to flow independently from each other to maintain a consistent tillage depth across the entire machine.
Now we move back to our row closers and these have a lot of new features, down pressure adjustment can be changed with cylinder stops. We also have tool-free angle adjustment with locking positions so you can adjust the angle of those quarters and get it to the desired strip width. Now our shank can till from four inches to 10 inches deep and on our dry fertilizer models you can place the dry fertilizer in different positions and you can adjust that separately from the shank. Now we've also recently increased our hose diameter on our dry fertilizer models to hit those higher application rates needed in a lot of different tillage scenarios. Now finally on our back on our crowfoot conditioning basket, we've got a narrower design to keep that on the strip and once again, you can adjust the down pressure with the cylinder stops seen here.
Also new for our Raptor for 2025 for six and eight row three-point models we have a fertilizer cart. So it is a pull type attachment where the three-point machine hooks to the back of the cart and then you can deliver dry fertilizer using a three-point machine. Our pull type models are available in 12 and 16 rows and you can get a dry fertilizer system as seen here all built by the same manufacturer or a liquid fertilizer system or a tillage application only. So we're excited to show you the brand new Unverfirth Raptor strip tillage tool models 2130 and 2115.
Speaker 10:
Behind me here we have the Duraplacer. It's a brand new toolbar from FastX Solutions. And so we've introduced this here at Upon Progress show a collaboration between Yetter farm equipment and Fast Act solutions. So the fast Duraplacer with Yetter Strip Freshener CC is what we have here behind. So really what we're introducing to the market is transforming our strip tool a little bit into a high speed higher efficiency strip fill. So traditionally we think of strip till as a shank or a knife, it's going to be going a little bit deeper. It's a high horsepower requirement, fairly low speed requirements or abilities I should say. So what we've really done is we've been concentrating now over the last decade trying to become more efficient in our strip till passes to the field. Now for us, we always talk about strip till as your system, not necessarily the tool, but as far as the tools that it takes to carry out our strip till, we can kind of put different pieces in place.
So looking for those pieces, it's been able to speed up and ultimately become just more efficient in that application pass. So this particular machine here, we're using the Yetter Strip Freshener CC's, the CC stands for cap control. It gives you, the operator, the ability to be able to control the adjustments on this machine, the performance of this machine from the tractor cabin. So that right there is going to speed up our process because we don't have to get out so much make adjustments, but ultimately when we're in the cab, we're typically going to be running this at speeds anywhere from eight to 10 mile per hour and we're typically going to be using about 10 horsepower, slightly more than that per row to be able to achieve that speed. So when I look at a 24 row machine, like what's behind me here, we're talking about a 24 row machine getting pulled with about a 350 horse, like a front wheel assist tractor and then being able to do about 55 to 60 anchors per hour.
We can get this with liquid or dry fertilizer. The machine behind me that we have here is a liquid machine. It's going to have 2,400 gallon tank on it. Of course you can see the large wheels for the high load carrying capacity as well. So this machine's going to give us the ability to carry a large capacity, not having to make many stops, not having to get out to make adjustments because [inaudible 00:30:57] going that off in the cab and then ultimately, like I said, being able to cover 55 to 60 anchors per hour. What we have right here, this is when we say the cab control, this is the control box that's going to go in the cab. Of course we're going to have a monitor, whether it be an AG leader or a deer or many others that's going to be controlling your fertilizer and everything like that.
But as far as the row units performance, we're going to be using this cab control. So this cab control using pneumatics is going to give us the ability to control downforce on the row units. It's going to control up or downforce on the row cleaner, and then it's also going to control up or downforce on our rowing basket. So it's going to give you the ability from the cab to be able to change, make adjustments so that way we can change the performance of the units to whatever our conditions are. So what we have here is the Yetter Strip Freshener CC, the cab control row units. Now this particular unit is not new. We've actually had this out now for four years and we even made another model, the standard strip freshener is even longer than that. But this particular unit is going to be all on a set of parallel linkings with our pneumatic downforce.
Up front, we're going to manage the residue with the row cleaners. That's going to allow us to keep our strip clean. And our strip till, really our strip till is managing residue and creating the ideal seed growing environment within those specific zones in the field. That's what really strip till is doing. So this particular unit is going to do that very well, so we clear the residue first. Then we have our tillage holders that are coming through here and these are going to run at a specific angle. We sharp through the blades and that's what's actually doing the tillage for us. It's a very controlled tillage. We have the ability to set the depth, which is then going to be able to run anywhere from an inch and a half to four inches deep. So that's where we're really making that the IVLC bed. Then on the back we have our conditioning basket or the rolling basket.
That is the part that's going to make sure that we get the consistency in that strip that's also going to press that to be able to get the air out of that. That's why we're able to run this directly ahead of the planter, same time with the planter or the same day anyway, the day before, just very close to the planter, but not introducing too much air into there because we're able to make getting that air out of there by firming that up and making just the ideal seed growing environment. Of course, this particular model here has the liquid as well. So we're putting the liquid on this particular unit on the edge of the strips. So we're ending up with two nitrogen bands about four inches to the side and at seed depth. So just the ideal placement of our nitrogen for a seed growing environment.
The fact that this is a 60 foot machine that's kind of unique. I mean there are other 60 footers out there, but not a lot and commercially available. So that's one benefit or feature of this. But along with that, this particular machine is custom made for these strip freshener units. So we have a front fold design. It's going to be a very narrow transport and 15 feet three inches wide. So very narrow transport. It's going to have a flip wing and then a front fold design to be able to give us that narrow transport. But that's also going to allow us a five section frame. So then we actually have adjustable downforce on the inner wings and outer wings, and those are all set in the middle of the machine. So this particular machine not only unique because it's 60 feet, but it's unique because of the adjustments and how easy those adjustments can be performed on this machine. So it's just really everything that we've been looking for when we think of getting to that 60 foot strip field mark.
Noah Newman:
All right, that's going to do it for this week's episode of the Strip Till Farmer podcast. Thanks to Yetter for sponsoring. And once again, thanks to you as always for tuning in and until next time, for all things strip till head to Striptillfarmer.com. I'm Noah Newman. Have a great day.
