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Jay Riddell and Brian Watkins help us answer the question — when’s the best time to make strips? — on this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.

Forty-five percent of strip-tillers make their strips in the fall, 33% in the spring and 21% do a little bit of both according to the latest Strip-Till Farmer Benchmark Study. Sparland, Ill., strip-tiller Jay Riddell and Kenton, Ohio, strip-tiller Brian Watkins had a conversation with technology editor Noah Newman about the pros and cons of both fall and spring strip-till during the 2024 National Strip-Tillage Conference.

Riddell and Watkins also share their nutrient management strategies, strip-till truths, cover crop philosophies, lessons learned over the years and more!

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.

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Full Transcript 

It is time for another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. Great to have you with us. I'm your host technology editor, Noah Newman. All right, 45% of strip-tillers make their strips in the fall, 33% in the spring, and 21% do a little bit of both according to the latest strip-till farmer benchmark study. Let's weigh the benefits of fall and spring strip-till with Kenton, Ohio strip-tiller Brian Watkins, and Sparland, Illinois strip-tiller Jay Riddell, who joined me for a conversation during the 2024 National Strip-Tillage Conference. Roll tape.

Yeah. I'm Jay Riddell. I'm a fourth generation farmer in north central Illinois, about 30 miles north of Peoria. We farm about 3,000 acres, but then we custom strip and so we try to get about 5,000 acres through the bar in the fall, and then we'll custom strip a couple thousand acres in the spring if the conditions allow.

And how long have you been strip-tilling for?

Yeah, we've been strip-tilling since '07, and we've been putting dry in the strip since '09.

Gotcha. How about you Brian? Let's learn a little bit about Brian Watkins.

Yeah, sure. I farm in west central Ohio with my brother and nephew. We farm between 11 and 12,000 acres corn, soy. We have about 1,000 acres of winter wheat we grow every year. We have livestock, we have our own swine finishing set up. And then we also take quite a bit advantage of a dairy. We have one farm that is right next to a dairy, we're getting a lot of dairy manure there, and then we also have chicken litter. But in terms of strip-till, we have some land that we feel like we just have to no-till it because of erosion issues, but we're probably strip-tilling, in some manner, about 75% of our corn.

Why strip-till? What was the switch to strip-till like, and what were you doing before strip-till, full tillage? Jay, you can start.

Yeah, we were doing full tillage. And little more background, is we have mainly Muscatine silt loam, good black dirt there around the home. Now, granted, we do travel about 16 miles and we have some black sand and some blow sand that's also under irrigation. And so, we went from full tillage to the strip-till, and with the goal of trying to get the nutrients where we felt they really needed to be was down in the band. We have had a fairly large cattle operation, which we've since gotten out of, so the strip-till also made it a lot nicer. We could go out there and plant and didn't have to get a field cultivator rolling ahead of us, we just could go right out there. So logistic and manpower-wise, it made a lot of sense for us.

How about you Brian? Strip-till, why did you adopt that?

Well, strip-till, as everybody here knows, it makes a lot of sense. And we actually tried it back in the 90s with some older style equipment. And really, essentially, an applicator type knife. And we struggled to get it done in the fall, mainly because by the time harvest was done most years our soils were out of condition. We farm in heavy clay, we farm in soils that we have to have tile a patterned system or we really can't farm it, and we just struggled to get it done. And so, we went to mostly no-till. I think the thing that brought us back was going to a spring operation. And we were putting on a lot of fertilizer with the planter and we were able to pull that off, do it in the spring. We weren't running a shank, we were running actually the Dawn Pluribus that are out here, and that was a middle ground fit for us where we still are working up a fairly good amount of dirt but we could do it in the spring, and that's what brought us back.

And then, most recently we hired a custom stripper to do it in the fall with the shank machine, with the Krause machine. And because we're easing back into the shank and maybe doing some more of that in the fall, but also doing some shank in the spring. Forever, I didn't think that you could do that in our soils. And this is just looking across the fence, we've got some neighbors that have proven to me that you can in certain conditions. I think it's really important to be flexible. You can go into a spring all set up to do spring strip-till, and in our situation, and the weather may dictate that it's not such a good idea. And if that's the case, then we still can no-till, and we have different ways that we can skin the cat depending upon the weather. If it's reasonably dry, reasonably good conditions, then the strip-till is the way to go.

So you fall into that 20 or so percent in our survey that you do make your strips in the spring and the fall. You do a little bit of both, and flexibility is key for you.

Right.

Well, what about you, Jay? Are you fall, spring, or both?

For our operation, we like the fall. I've often said that, well, I'll take a bad strip made in the fall just because I know it's going to freeze out, it's going to mellow out. It may not be that pretty in the fall, but come spring it's been pretty good and we don't have to worry that the weather's going to allow us to do it. Now that we've been running more and more custom acres in the spring with our shank machine, I was always worried about there being air voids and even a heavy wear, a heavy anhydrous use area. And that plant right behind me, by right behind me, they're four or five days behind that bar, but they've gotten along really, really well with it.

And so, the strip-till is... I still prefer the fall for my own acres because just peace of mind I know it's done. But the spring strip-till certainly has some validity in my area. And then switching to no-till or... And in our area too, you have to worry a little bit about some erosion in the strips, especially if we're froze about two inches down still. As the frost is coming out and we catch a rain, that can be a problem. Because of that, we don't run any rolling basket on our strip-till bar in the fall, and try to leave a pretty rough strip to battle that erosion.

Now, when you're making strips in the fall, what does your nutrient application look like? Are you applying nutrients with the strip-till bar?

Yeah. Our bar has two compartments on it, two six-ton southward compartments. And so, we'll take potash in one and then we'll take MAP or DAP and sulfur. This past year has been in AMS, and then we'll blend it as we go. We have management zones, and so we variable rate both ingredients of dry and anhydrous in the fall. But the majority of our nitrogen program is usually anhydrous as side dress. Really, our strip program is... And we strip ahead of corn and beans every year, basically all the acres, and we're basically just putting dry down for the most part.

What about you, Brian? What does your nutrient application system look like with strip-till?

Well, in the spring what we have primarily been doing is running basically a low, just a base rate we call it, or whatever you want to. A low rate of P and K, and then nitrogen. And we've had liquid rigs in the past, now we have a dry rig. And with the dry rig we have run straight urea in the past and tried to place it, and we got along great for quite a long time and then we had one disaster. Well, we had an event, I guess you would say, where it was cold and dry and it stayed cold and dry, and we got ammonia burn off the urea. And we actually salvaged the crop and it actually it ended up yielding pretty well., but looking at it when it was about V3 or V4, it looked terrible. Anyway, we have now switched to ESN. Our standard program is 20 units of P, 30 units of K, maybe 80 units of N, mostly as ESN, and then some zinc sulfate. And that's what we're running in the spring.

And I know both of you are heavy users of precision technology. Correct? Especially you, Jay, I interviewed you a couple of years ago. Why don't you just give us the rundown on how you're working precision technology into your strip-till system.

Yeah. Because of the management zones, we possibly could have three prescriptions going down with the anhydrous bar between the N, P, and K. and then, we also utilize Precision Planting just came out with a blockage monitor that's also a flow monitor. Which is nice, especially when doing custom work, to be sure that... Because it not only detects a blockage, it's actually giving you how much flow is going through each individual row. It's a good double check. We just run a 16 row older Deere planter that's got all the precision goodies on it. Which, again, I think the strip-till is all a system. And I think the add-on of hydraulic downforce and the row cleaners, the reveal row cleaners and the furrow force are all pieces that really fit well to the strip-till, especially if you get in those times where you're not perfectly on the strip.

We run Deere guidance, and we have the eye guide so we've got the globe back on the back of the strip-till bar, and then also on the planter and then a globe on the tractor. Yeah, we really try hard on collecting data and measuring the trials that we'd run. We run a lot of trials there on our own place. And so, we've been pretty heavy adapters of the technology.

And Brian, whether you're making strips in the fall or spring, how much does precision technology give you an edge?

We do grid soil sampling. We track obviously everything that we've applied, and we also track removal, and then that drives our recommendations until the next round of soil tests. We do very intensive... I'm a skeptic of soil tests, honestly, but we do have a provider that has an automated probe machine. And we do on a fairly long time period, like eight to 10 years between tests, but we do very intensive, like less than half acre grids. And then that drives our fertility. Now, I say that drives our fertility, but there's a few monkey wrenches mainly coming from the fact that we have a lot of manure availability. And so, if we have a field that is testing low that needs built up, we're going to hit that with manure. And that's not variable rate, we don't have the capability for that. But we'll just do that, and then we'll come back in and variable rate after that at a maintenance level.

The one thing I also didn't mention, we like spring strip-till, it's been with the Dawn, which is a hybrid. We're going to go to shanks, we're still going to try to do it the spring. But what we've been doing for quite a long time in the fall is essentially a zero soil disturbance strip, if you want to call it that. We've run Yetter Magnums. We took an old planter and reworked it, and that's placing the fertilizer fairly shallow, obviously. But we're going in the fall and we're banding the fertilizer, we're distributing it with our spring strip-till tank, so we feel like we get really good distribution. That's where we do the variable rate. That's where in the fall. And of course you can't see any, it's all based on guidance because you can't see where we've been. You couldn't go out there in the spring and have any idea where we put this band of fertilizer, but we use the guidance system to plant back over the top of that. Whether we're running the strip-till over the top of that or whether we're just running the planter over.

Brian, just on your last statement there about putting the nutrients on in the fall and you can't see where you've been, I understand how your guidance is going to take care of that. But what happens in the spring? Like you said, you were using Dawn units for a while. With the row cleaners there, aren't you moving that residue out of the way? Or do you assume that all the precipitation and stuff has moved it off the residue and down into the top layer of the soil a little bit? Or, what's your feeling on that?

Well, the reason we're doing this zero soil disturbance is basically so we're not eroding. We're trying to keep that there. We're trying to slice that in, we're not removing the residue in the fall. Which I think you get. Then in the spring we're either going to run the planter over it with a row cleaner, essentially right over the top of that. And the only thing that's there is the fertilizer, there's no tillage. If we run the Dawn and we put on a little bit more of fresh fertilizer, if you will, plus the nitrogen, obviously then we're doing a strip-till over the top of where we have this band of fertilizer.

When you're banding the fertilizer in the fall, you're putting it down with a colter? Just a straight Colter or something? Or [inaudible 00:14:08]-

We've done it two ways. A Yetter Magnum is actually a single disc. It's like a John Deere air seeder drill. It's a single disc on an angle, and it'll go down. We can put it six inches deep with that.

I understand that. Yes.

Okay? We've done it that way. Now, what we've done recently though is we bought an old corn planter, and we're using the double disc openers on the corn. We're just shooting the fertilizer, and we're only going probably two to three inches is where we're putting that band. And again, for the most part our soils are pretty high testing so we're not putting huge amounts in there. Over the winter we've never seen any problem in terms of a salt burn or anything by spring. And so, that's what we're doing.

Thank you.

For you, Jay, do you freshen strips in the fall, since you mentioned you leave your fall strips fairly rough?

No, not as a practice. We did have a neighbor who bought a strip freshener this year and we ran it over some acres. A fair amount of acres this spring, really just trying to dry ground out. We're still playing with if it has a place to fit or not. Back to the precision frame-mounted row cleaners that have a wheel, we can really stand on those, and so it almost does a light tillage on top of that strip to smooth it out some. Even though it's a high-speed planter, I don't feel like we can run over six miles an hour with it unless we have ran the freshener. And then where we run the freshener, yeah, we can get up to 10 miles an hour and the electronics are all telling me our placement's good. As of right now, no, we're not doing much freshener.

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 Y-E-T-T-E-R-C-O.com.

What advice would you give to people if they're trying to decide, gee, should I make my strips in the fall? Should I do this in the spring? What would you say, Brian? What would you tell them?

Well, I think in our situation... And obviously everything is different, right? In our situation, I think the ideal is in the spring. For one thing you can put nitrogen on, and so you're putting that on as you're doing some other things. I think that you can create the seedbed in the spring. In these clay soils in the fall it depends on the year. You talk about freezing and thawing and how that can mellow things out. But in a heavy clay, especially... I don't know, sometimes we do tillage and I feel like it recompacts harder than it was before. If you have some soil structure, you take away the structure, it's almost harder. There are people that run these high-speed discs in the fall, and I get it, honestly. Again, some years it'll work. You get a hard winter, it mellows it out and then I see why you would do it.

What I'm trying to say here is, if you can do it in the spring, I think you should. But for us, a little bit of it in the fall can then be where we start planting. It is true, even in our soils, even if the bulk density hasn't changed that much by the time we get to spring. If we run that in the fall, that's going to be the first thing that's ready to plant. If we can get a day's worth of planting there while we're starting to run the other strip-till, that's where it makes sense. And so, when you talk fall versus spring, I think there's a place.

For me, I like the fall from a logistic standpoint of the amount of help we have. As soon as the harvest operation's wrapping up, we're starting to make the strips. And again, because of our situation, our soils and the freeze-thaw cycles, I feel like the strips are plenty adequate. In the spring, then we have... I guess I feel like we could be out there planting. We plant all of our soybeans first before our corn, and so we're willing to go in there and put them in a little adverse conditions. And I can go start planting soybeans before I could even think about dragging that strip-till bar through anything. With that being said, just depending on the spring, that's why I prefer the fall.

Now, this year we went out and we did several thousand acres in February, which is the first time in my memory that I can remember ground conditions being like that. And if you'd tell me that every year I had ground conditions like that in February, that's when I would go do mine. So that's what it is for me. Do you plant your corn or beans first? Or both?

There's a begin date on the beans that we don't go earlier than. We have lost beans to frost. We have replanted hundreds and hundreds of in certain years we plant, and that could even be planted past our window. But the point is we wait to a certain date. But I believe that we need to just get the beans in as soon as we can when the conditions are right, and just push, push, push. With corn, I tend to spread out the window a little bit. I didn't used to be that way, we are much more that way now. And I've got long-term... You talk about precision. One of the things we've looked at is planting date versus yield. And even not just planting date, but in a given spring season the first day you could go, which might be the middle of April, might be the middle of May. Where it just depends on the weather. And looked at that first day to last day and the soybean curve, it's a straight line.

It is the earlier the better, really. Unless they get frosted off. The corn is more of a curve. And if you tend to get in a little too wet or whatever, or if it just stays cold and wet. Maybe it's perfect when you plant it, and then all of a sudden it's 40 degrees for a week and wet. And so, we've seen more of a curve. Anyway, my point is that we spread that out.

Again, spring strip-till, if you could just write your own ticket, you would do the spring strip-till, it would get a shower, it would settle down a little bit, it'd be a stale seedbed. That's perfection. We talk about this winter, we did some strips this year in March. And we used some ESN, we pulled back the nitrogen rate because it just seemed early. But I'll tell you, that planted perfectly. Because it did what I said, it was essentially a stale seedbed. I think we planted it probably a month after we did it, and I'm telling you, we had as perfect to stand an emergence there as I can think of. That's ideal if you can pull it off. Do you put on any fertilizer with your planter?

We do. We have the conceal on our planter, and we'll put 28 and thiazole on both sides. And again, we have these varying things. If it's a manure field, if it's things we might up, we'll vary the rate. But we want to make sure that there is some nitrate nitrogen fairly close to the seed. And so, even where we strip-till we'll still put on, I think it's about eight gallons. Four gallons on each side of which it's six and two of 28 and thiazole. And so that we know that we got something right there to get started before it gets down. Especially with the ESN, it takes a while for that to be available, and so we want to have both there.

Are you running sulfur, zinc, humic, or anything else in your strips?

Yeah, we're running sulfur. We have been running elemental sulfur for the past few years. This crop in the field now is the first that we went to AMS instead of sulfur. Our soil tests had told us that we were pretty good with sulfur, so elemental was cheap, we knew it wasn't going to be readily available. But we decided after last year we would like to get maybe a little more nitrogen in our fall strips, just a little more of a bump. And we didn't want to put on anhydrous, just then we'd have to be putting on the full rate of N-serve, it got pretty expensive when we knew we were wanting to side dress. So going to the AMS then got us a little more nitrogen in the strip.

We don't have anything on the planter liquid-wise, so we're really counting on what's in the strip to give us that pop-up effect. We've ran some trials with some micros and with some humics, and in our soils we hadn't seen anything. This fall we're going to run some pell-lime. I am concerned where we've got two hot zones that have been bouncing back and forth on these 15 inches that maybe we have an acidic zone down there too. That's one of the trials we're going to run this next year.

We run zinc in the strip in the spring. We put the sulfur on, as I mentioned, with the corn planter. We broadcast sulfur on all our soybeans with some potash after we plant them. Sulfur has become something that we're totally focused on. We're putting sulfur on everything now. And we've done trials, we've seen other trials. That broadcast of sulfur on the soybeans, it can be a five bushel easy type thing. And so, that's how we deal with zinc and sulfur.

Now, you mentioned humic. I went to the round table. I don't know how many of you in here went to the round table that was the biological. I'm bi curious. I'm biological curious. We've been up and down with that. We've done this before. In the 90s there was a guy by the name of Dave Larson from Princeton, Illinois, and we bought some compost tea. And we've tried. But I will say right now we're pretty low on the scale in terms of biological products.

Now, we are heavy cover crop users. Heavy. All of our wheat, we do a little bit of double cropping, but most of it has a very broad set of different cover crops in the wheat. We plant rye if we can, and corn, ahead of our soybeans. We've been playing around with cover crops ahead of corn. Doing a strip of rye, like a 30-inch row rye and then planting between it. We're doing biology there. We've got manure. And the manure, without question, is a biological product. I'm not discounting these, but I just haven't been able to make money with some of the other ideas. Look, I listen to David Hula, I listen to the Total Acre people, they're using some of these. Using fungicide as a plant growth regulator. All of that is valid, but I cannot say that's part of our program.

Jay, you use cover crops too, right?

Yeah, we try to. That is the one application that we don't do. We hire guy to come in and drill rye right in our corn stalks that are going to beans. But if he can't be right behind the combine, then we stop him if he gets behind. Because I want that cover crop to germinate, establish itself, and then the strip-till bar to take it out. So then come next spring, looking from the road, you can't tell that those strips are there. But you go out there and we plant it green and pull back the rye and, yeah, you find the strips are right there.

We do have, with a neighbor, we've got our own ability to seed this year. And we're going to try doing the same where we leave a strip without rye in it. We've played some with rye ahead of corn that cost us 20 bushel of corn, and we just couldn't get over what we felt was the nitrogen penalty on it. So, we'll see. We'll do some more playing and try to find something ahead of corn. I think there's good value to build organic matter is what we're trying to do with the covers.

So cereal rye, what species are you using? Cereal rye-

Well, cereal rye is the prime. It is the king of cover crops. One year we ruined our wheat. We figured out how not to do that, but this was about six years ago. We didn't put fungicide out at the right time, our wheat got vomit toxin and basically became junk. The mills wouldn't take it, so we used wheat instead of rye. And never going to do that again. Because it's just not the same, it's harder to kill. I like rye to suck moisture, but wheat, commercial varieties of wheat will pull moisture out the ground like you can't believe.

Anyway. But following our wheat crops, our harvested wheat crops, we'll use the radishes, kale, sunn hemp, rape seed, sunflowers. It's a menagerie out there. And my nephew runs that, and he's tried some different mixes. Clover is another. We want to try to really broaden. Again, that is a biological thing too. The more broad species of plants you have growing, the more different species of beneficials you're going to have in the soil.

Either of you're making strips ahead of soybeans? Jay, I know you are, right?

Yeah. Yep. Personally, I will say to me there's more benefit to making. And so, it's too wet to get out there and do any tillage in the spring, but I feel like I can pull my planter through it because I've got those strips that are a little drier, a little warmer, and then I got all the residue in between to keep from the planter digging in.

100% strip-till all soybeans, all corn?

Yeah, all on 30-inch rows.

Brian, you ever strip-till [inaudible 00:29:26]-

I think that makes a lot of sense, actually. Obviously, if you're trying to plant those beans early, and again, there's much less penalty for 30-inch row beans if they're planted early. We have air seeders for the weeds and for our cover crops. And we use an air seeder, we use a planter that's a twin row planter for our beans. And so, no, we don't do any stripping ahead of beans.

Are you guys making your strips in the same spot every year, or are you moving them over?

Right now we will make our soybean strip right here and then we'll strip right on top of that with our corn plant. And then, we'll move over 15 inches and go beans here and then corn on fields that are rotated. But as we are lowering populations down, it seems like when we get below 100,000 on bean pop, we're pretty fortunate that we live in a good area, we raise 75 to 80 bushel beans. And when you get the pops down under 100,000, the stem is so big that actually our strip-till bar, it's now almost like we're pulling it through the corn residue. And we're having trouble building a good berm. I really like going beans, corn here and then beans, corn here, because you end up with both crops. Not always corn here and then always beans here. But we're going to have to analyze that a little better, because as we plant less and less bean pop, we're having a lot harder time tearing it out with the strip-till bar.

Anything to add to that, Brian?

Well, right or wrong, we move. Where we have corn bean rotation, and we're not stripping the beans, so we plant the corn here and then two years later we plant it 15 inches over. So we're moving back and forth.

Yeah, maybe two questions. One is, what keeps you up at night thinking about the next year's crop? And then, what's going really well for you?

Well, right now what keeps me up at night is that the price of corn is about $3.60. And where's it going to go? But that's neither here nor there for what we're talking about. Well, okay, so we're making a change. We're going to go to a shank next spring, and the biggest risk is going to be that we have air pockets and we don't have good seed soil. And we've got some strategies about that in terms of firming it. As I said, if we can get a shower on it before we plant, that would be ideal, and we'll see how that goes.

As far as what's going well. What's going well, honestly, I don't know if this is relevant or not, but I said I farm with my brother and my nephew. And I ran our fertility program during the core of my farming career, and I've turned it to my nephew, who's 35 years old at this point. He's been running it for the last six years, and he's doing a great job. And that's working great. What I'm talking to you about here is in a long-term evolution, but he's the one that's driving it right now, and it's going really well.

I guess I'll start with what has in the past been keeping me up at night is labor and finding good quality people. Because it's not like we have a ripper and just go out there and rip. Now, the strip-till bar is running the prescriptions that it is, and you want it obviously to be done right. And the small things that are annoying me is we're struggling some on the outside rows around fields, the one or two rows making a good strip in there because we're having some weed pressure and things come back in. Actually, this year we'll run around the fall with... It's actually an Orthman pivot track filler, and try to work just that outer edge just to make that a little prettier. Water hemp has also been a headache this year or two.

I guess, then what we're pretty proud of is, well, we feel like our yields have been really good. We've cut back on a lot of our inputs. And then, what's got me feeling really good right now is the team I have. I got a 22-year-old young woman who's just phenomenal. She's a great operator, she's great in the office. She has her CDL, she can do anything. And then, we just added a 60-year-old gentleman who's going to hit the ground running. Right now what makes me feel good is that I think we've got a team now that we can really get a lot of things done and I don't feel like I have to do it.

Well, it looks like you have a lot to look forward to in the coming year. Now, as we wrap things up here I'm going to put you on the spot with this one. This could be from a conversation you had in the hallway here, or during lunch or breakfast, or a presentation or talk with one of our sponsors. Give me one big takeaway or something surprising maybe, or something new you learned. Kind of a loaded question, I know. From the Strip-Till Conference over these past couple days, one big thing.

Well, I can give you two. I have seen him all over the place, but I'd never actually been in a room when he was talking. And I thought he was very open, and that was David Hula. I thought that was a tremendous session just for farming. The second thing is, I'll say up here, I went to the session where it's called Arva-

Arva Intelligence.

... Arva Intelligence, about getting paid for your practices, driven by companies' desire to be carbon friendly, carbon-neutral. I didn't realize what was available. I'm aware of some of the ethanol plant stuff. Obviously, I'm aware of carbon offsets. But what he was talking about was something really different that I am going to follow up on.

Jay?

Yeah, I think Mr. Culmer's speech and the stratification, and that's by putting our dry in ahead of the corn and ahead of the beans. And just really thinking more about the micro environment that we've created right down there, and that we're doing all that we can to maximize that return. And I enjoyed Brian's. I sat in Brian's round table. I didn't realize we were going to be up here today. And so, I appreciated his takeaway, everything has to go back to the cost of what's doing it. And sometimes we all know how we could do what Mr. Hula can do. Well, I can't do what he could do. But so much of that is to row crop farming what tractor pulling is. It's almost not a practical standpoint. But being reminded that we have to watch our cost per acre and how that works is really what adds to my problem.

And that'll do it for this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. Thanks so much for tuning in. And until next time, for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. Have a great Thanksgiving, we'll see you soon.