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On this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, Andrew Reuschel details his switch from no-till to strip-till in Golden, Ill.

Reuschel explains the motivation behind his transition to strip-till after decades of no-till on the family farm. The 5th-generation farmer shares how he built his own strip-till toolbar and strip freshener and reveals the biggest thing he’s learned in the first few years of his new strip-till system.  

Reuschel also dives into his cover crop playbook and discusses how a mix of cereal rye and annual ryegrass ahead of strip-tilled corn is saving him big time on herbicide and fertilizer costs.

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

Great to have you with us for another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast. I'm your host, technology editor, Noah Newman. Thanks to our sponsor Yetter Farm Equipment for making this series possible. And today we're catching up with Andrew Reuschel, who's going to detail his switch from no-till to strip-till in Golden, Illinois. He'll explain the motivation behind his transition to strip-till after decades of no-till on the family farm, and also share how he built his own strip-till toolbar and strip freshener, as well as revealing the biggest thing he's learned in the first few years of his new strip-till system. And we'll also find out how a mix of cereal rye and annual ryegrass is saving him big time on herbicide and fertilizer costs. Let's jump right in. Here's Andrew.

So we're fifth generation on the same home farm in Adams County in Illinois. My grandpa Louie got really big into conservation tillage and stuff. In the seventies, he was already trying to stop plowing so much. That was a big deal back then. But then in the eighties, grandpa moved to no-till. Which was a really bad time to move to no-till, because we had just droughts and then just the whole farm economy during the eighties. And during the nineties, my grandpa was trying to do organics in the mid-nineties. So my grandpa flirted off and on with no-till and then he went back the different direction with organics, but he was still using cover crops. And then in the early nineties, my dad and my grandpa was using a lot of cover crops and reduced tillage, and that was during the early part of the decade when it was just raining all the time. So they had a lot of issues there.

And then my grandpa retired and my dad went away from all of that, went to the easiest system he could think of, a one-pass tillage in the fall and a one-pass tillage in the spring. So my dad was really pretty reduced tillage all throughout the 2000s. I graduated high school. I was in the military, and I was gone. I left the farm for nine years. I came back in 2016. So I've been farming. I bought my first farm in 2016 when I came back. So we've been back since 2016. I went right back into cover crops, tried to do no-till and just had a lot of issues, a lot of struggles with no-till. I mean, we had successes too, don't get me wrong, but they weren't an every acre, every year, easy to manage type of situation for us.

So we ended up trying to go to strip-till. So I always tell people that I have about 50 years worth of knowledge and experience, all through failure when it comes to cover crop and reduced tillage. We just got a lot of failure. And so because of that, we know a lot. And now we have three generations of people failing. And that's how come we're successful now, is we put in the time of trying things. Of failing and trying a new thing and figuring out why this worked, why this doesn't work, and reprogramming how we understand things. And no longer just take what other people say and accept it as gospel. Everything we do is adapted with the experiences and the knowledge that we have and we can mix in with other people with their knowledge and their experience. But when someone tells me to do something, I'd be like, "Yeah, nope. I've been there, done that. I know that bites. That stinks, right? That's not a good idea."

Yeah. I mean, you learn a lot from your failures and you read a lot of articles and you usually just see the good stuff, the successes and what worked really well. Every farm's different. And you mentioned all the failures you've had over the years. So what are some of the failures or challenges that you had with no-till that motivated you to start strip-tilling?

It's going to be the exact same thing that probably every farmer says with no-till. I want a nice perfect consistent seedbed of moisture and temperature when I plant. And our farms are not consistent across the field. And so while the farm might be ready, parts of it's not. And so you plant, and then parts of the field just don't do well or you have to keep waiting and waiting. And then you're waiting too long, in my opinion. And I think I feel like I was always giving up yield while I was waiting to plant later until I had a much better seed bed. And I just did not like that, right? When I knew that I could just run a tillage equipment and I could get that stand and I could be planting. And I could get that corn up and out of the ground and it'll be growing three weeks sooner.

So that was a really big thing is really just the planting, planting date and planting conditions for corn especially. So we still plan on no-tilling all of our soybeans into a standing green cover crop every year. When I was trying to plant my corn green in April, some years it would work and some years it wouldn't. And so when we started strip-tilling corn in the spring or even strip-tilling corn in the fall and then planting green in the spring, having that strip was like a buffer there that kind of gave us... I was able to get in to plant earlier.

I had a more consistent planting conditions, depth, moisture, and temperature. And I got that cover crop a little bit further away from my corn plants when it comes out of the ground. And so since moving to just strip-till alone or strip-till in the fall, and then when we started strip freshening in the spring, we have had much more consistent corn coming out of that ground. Much more consistent results, much more consistent coming out of the ground within 24 to 36 hours. Everything's just much more consistent that you're, what you're looking for from that young corn plant. And so we've had much better results and we've had much better yields because of that.

Yeah. So let's go through the process of that first year, when you started strip-tilling. Did you already have the equipment you needed? Did you have to go out and buy a new strip-till rig? What were some of the challenges and what did that look like when you started strip-tilling?

Well, I like to say that we used to do poor man strip-till where we would put down, I'd put down folione hydrous. And then in the spring if the conditions were right, we would just be planting right on top of that folione hydrous. Now that works some years, but that's not a year-in, year-out, every field conditions type of a deal. So we were doing that and we were banking on that poor man strip-till of just playing right on top of the folione hydrous strip. And that was working and we really liked that. Okay, now we see the concept. Okay, well then we started to get into situations where that ground just needed to get hit in the spring, just so that I could plant there in the spring at the time that I wanted to plant. And so we realized that we needed a strip freshener, something that I could do very low disturbance. Go in there, hit that strip one more time and get in there and plant.

At the same time, I had liquid on my planter and dad was pulling the liquid off the planter. He hated it. He never wanted to have liquid on the planter to begin with. He just wanted to plant. He wanted to focus on just planting and was not a fan of the liquid. So he was pulling off the liquid one fall off the planter. And so I was like, "All right. Well then I need a strip freshener and we'll put the liquid on the strip freshener." We decided to build a strip-till bar that was able to do folione hydrous, and then I could convert that bar into being able to run spring strips. And so we built this toolbar, we built it together. So in the fall I would do folione hydrous with a shank, with a knife, and then in the spring I would take the shank out, I'd put a bunch of coulters on or shark teeth. I put rolling baskets on and I replumbed the whole thing for liquid.

And we made a lot of compromises when we built that toolbar. So we compromised the fall strips that we built and we compromised the spring stripping, the spring pressuring. We made a lot of compromises, but we built a toolbar that was able to do both, and we built it very cheaply. And then we ran that for about three and a half, four years. I can't exactly remember. And it proved all the concepts. We did it for a low price. We realized, okay, there are things that we really, really like about the bar that we built, about the row units that we use, how we have it all set up. We proved all the concepts, and now where we're at is we just sold that toolbar off and we're investing more money into the whole system and realizing, yes, this has merit, this has depth. We really like it. Now we're ready to adjust and now we're ready to [inaudible 00:10:24].

And all those compromises that we made several years ago, now some of these compromises are non-negotiables. So we're just looking to improve and build upon the knowledge. And we're ready to put the money into it, and we're looking forward to building a much better resilient system that gives us a much more consistent system than what we had previously. So again, another four years of great growth, great years of experience, but four years of more what I would call learning experience or some people would even call it failures. But everything's just learning experiences.

So then are you going to use the same custom-built toolbar this year, or are you looking to buy a new rig this year?

Nope, I just sold it and we bought an all new strip freshener, and so we'll build in a brand new strip freshener this winter and we'll be ready for it this spring. And then this summer, I'll build a new anhydrous bar.

Wow. So you're very handy guy, it sounds like. You put together all your own equipment rather than just going and buying something new.

Well, I can buy. So because we have watched so many things and because there are so many knowledgeable people out there in the world today, I can go and talk to somebody that's got 20 years of experience. And I can learn their 20 years of experience, learning experience, their learning failures. I can learn everything that they know, not everything, but I can go and talk to them for two hours and be caught up to speed, right?

Um-hmm.

Now, I can take their experience and I can go talk to somebody else and learn their 20 years worth of knowledge, experience, and learning and mistakes. And I can be caught up to speed within two hours. Now I just accumulated 40 years worth of experience, and it costs me four hours and there's going to be a lot of overlap. And then I can go and take all their experience, their knowledge, overlap mine, and I've got a clear-cut direction to go and one day's worth of talking and sharing ideas and collaborating. In one day, I have just saved myself another 20 years of mistakes to make.

Now I'm going to go and make my own mistakes again, my own learning experiences, but I've just saved so much time. I don't have to go and reinvent the wheel constantly. Take what other people learn, adapt it, add in what you know and what you don't know and what your experiences are and what your budgets are, and you can go home, build something, make it so that you can constantly adapt it and that it's not just like this one size fits all. And buy a few pieces of add-on equipment to it, run it for a few years, see how it works, manipulate it, cut it up with the torch or a plasma cutter, get a welder, add something onto it and keep going. Try that. Okay, now see if that's what you like and if it is. And if it's not, then you're all ready to either go and invest more money for different equipment because you don't like this direction or you're ready to change, or go and invest more money into something that you are already doing and buy some better equipment to do a better job.

But something is always changing constantly. Because you're always learning and you're always improving, you're always observing and seeing how that soil moves.

So you apply the anhydrous in the fall. Is there anything you apply when you freshen it up in the spring with the strip-till bar? And what's your nutrient management plan look like?

Yeah, so that has changed dramatically over the 10 years. Obviously we've gotten more knowledge and we've got more experience. So currently we're using a little bit of UAN, either 32 or 28, yearly dependent. We use a small base of that, working with our neighbors. And our neighbors are melting down AMS, dry AMS. They're making a nitrogen sulfur product, and they're also currently melting down potash. And so now we have a liquid K product, so we're using that as a base and we're not talking about a whole lot of gallons there. That stuff works a little bit faster and is a lot cheaper than ATS or KTS. And we're getting a still-concentrated product that mixes well. Then we're adding in humics, multiple different forms of humics. I think it's all 12%.

Yeah, we're still playing with a little bit what some people would call bugs in the jug, but we're looking for those bugs that we're using. We're selecting microbes and biology that activate phosphorus. So now we have NPKS, but I can't get the phosphorus, the JAR tests. If I use a phosphorus fertilizer, I'm not getting at the JAR test very well. And I know that phosphorus is easily manipulated by biology. So we're just using the biology to activate the phosphorus breakdown. Obviously still using some sugars to stimulate plant growth. Some fields we're using some boron and some fields we're using zinc, where we already have maybe hog manure and we have a high phosphorus soil already. So now I'm trying to cut that with a little bit of zinc there early. And some fields that we don't have phos soils, so I can pull the zinc out. But yeah, we're putting some boron in too, here and there, but everything is very easy to adjust on the fly, field by field and situation by situation, and so just makes us more versatile.

So you're doing variable rates when you apply all this stuff, do you do soil tests every year to determine your rates or how do you determine that?

I am on the fence when it comes to soil testing. I do what you would consider your normal soil test every four years. I do them on the election and the Olympics because that's your four-year soil tests. Mostly what I'm looking for there is my base saturations and calcium pH, just to see if there's any line that really kind of needs to be needed. But I'm not looking at the bray or the millich too much. I look at it just to see what's going on. But I have 30 years of soil tests, of grid samples from the same farms, and they've never really changed in value in 30 years. And that's even with a build program. You're constantly trying to build from old style way of mentality of thinking. So I guess I put less and less faith in it. We've done a lot of dry fertilizer tests or plots in the past with us and our neighbors and just don't seem to be moving the needle when it comes to applying dry fertilizer, really changing that P or K score.

So I try not to put much a whole lot of weight onto those numbers. Now, I try to still do some testing in season or pre-season, so we're still using cover crops. I like to kind of create a baseline. I'm trying to create a baseline or a guide when it comes to my cover crops. We've been doing biomass samples, so I know roughly if I have this much tonnage per acre that will equivalate to about this much available nutrients. Or nutrients that's in the cycle after I terminate. It'll become into the cycle, and then we're still taking Haney tests. I'm taking less of them and I'm taking them less. I'm doing less of them because I'm starting to build a database for our own farms and just kind of keeping a trend line. So that I can apply a little bit of nutrients before I plant, that kind of determines whether or not I need to plant, what my liquid mix is in my fresh pass or my pre-plant fertilizers.

And then I like to try to take another Haney in the summer to see whether or not, hey, if the economics and the environmental conditions, if it's all in play. If we need to side dress or wide drop later on in the season. And I like to take a tissue sample from those corn plants as well, just trying to build our own slight database and earmark it. And sometimes the plant might say, "Yeah, I can use a little bit something a little bit extra here to finish out." But if the environment or the economics don't really play, then maybe we won't run. But we get to make those decisions in season a little bit more.

So every year is different, it sounds like.

Well, I'm giving myself the option to make decisions in season rather than just having a plan, this is what we're going to do. And then just following that no matter.

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I know you might not have the exact number on this, but how much do you estimate that you save on fertilizer and maybe even herbicides because of your cover crops?

Oh, gosh. Well, I can only go by what the salesmen say, and I would say that I am not their best customer. I mean... I don't know. I've not sat down and really penciled it per se. I would assume that I am saving, I know I'm saving about $30 an acre on herbicide. But that's older information, so I'm not exactly for sure what's most current. But I can say that there's a few weeds in our area that just give us... A lot of escapes and soybeans. Shoot, what is that weed?

Mare's tail?

Mare's tail? Yeah, horseweed? Yeah. I haven't seen mare's tail, I don't think I've seen, I haven't seen mare's tail through my field. I see them a little bit on the corners every once in a while. I haven't seen a mare's tail. It has not been an issue since we've been doing cover crops. I remember when we first started coming back and I first started coming back and we were doing cover crops, mare's tail was in our fields. But those have gone away. We get the pressure of waterhemp. That has completely changed. Now we still have waterhemp pressure, but that waterhemp, instead of getting those early spring flushes, now we're getting our waterhemp at June 1st. We get our first flush of waterhemp in soybeans. And so that's interesting to watch. We still get waterhemp just like everybody else, but now that flush comes a lot later in the season. That's been interesting to see.

But I mean, we'll still have cockleburs and foxtail around tile risers and stuff where the ground is saturated. So we still have issues, don't get me wrong. I've seen more and more lamb's quarter. I don't know if you know what that weed is.

That's one I think I've actually never heard of. It's lamb's quarters?

Yeah, lamb's quarter. We've seen more lamb's quarter popping up. Now, dad and my grandpa, they talk about lamb's quarter from back when they were doing organics, from back in the day. They used to say that lamb's quarter was one of the best weeds to have, to find, because lamb's quarter says that you have good fertility.

Interesting.

So yeah, that was a good weed. And then opposed to smart weed. I don't know if you know what a smart weed is. It's a really low weed. And it's got a nice pretty little flower, but it's over saturated soils. So when you start to think about your weeds as indicators, I have seen my weeds change from what they were prior to us using covers to what they are today. Now we still have plants that are out of place, but the indicators have changed. The conditions have changed. So it's on a path. Is it the right path on the wrong path? We don't know yet, but we're still doing covers because we see the benefit.

Yeah. No, we could do an entire other podcast just on your cover crop usage. Which we did a couple years ago on Covercropstrategies.com, shameless plug. But for our strip-till audience, can you give us an idea of your cover crop playbook? What you're using on your strip-till acres, how you're applying it, how much you're applying, and if you can just give us a nuts and bolts of that.

So for about 10 years, we used a high boy machine. It was just a front mounted sprayer that they took the liquid off and applied a dry box and PVC pipes that came down and hit a fan. And we were spreading cover crops into steaming corn in August. So that when we came in and combined our corn in September, October, we would already have a green cover crop and it was all ready to go for our soybeans for next year. And then, we weren't doing a whole lot of cover crops ahead of corn. But the cover crops we were doing in the soybean stubble, I had a twin row drill that I had built, and that's what I was using. Since then, we have moved away from both of those systems and for a lot of external circumstances, not because we didn't like them, just from external circumstances.

And so we now just spread a hundred pounds of potash in the fall as a carrier for our cover crop. And it's in on the fall. Then for the soybean stubble, then we just, were applying fall anhydrous. And so we're stripping it and we got row cleaners, and so we're pushing that cover crop off to the side. And we're using a low rate of cereal rye ahead of our corn, a low rate, and it's away from that black strip. So we still, in the spring, we will have a black strip and we will have a low rate of cereal rye in between. Now we're doing that mostly based off of logistics and simplicity. Every once in a while I'll blend it, some annual ryegrass, kind of depending on what I think what my fall is going to look like and what I plan on my spring is going to look like.

You can only guesstimate so much of what kind of environments you're going to have. But if you know that you're going to have a really hard fall annual ryegrass just, or a really early cold snap, annual ryegrass in my experience, has not survived the cold snap, a real early cold snap. Now, I know that there's other varieties and other things that might work a little bit better than what we've been using. But I know the variety of annual ryegrass that I like to use, and I don't want to deviate from that because when we have deviated from it, I have had issues in termination in the spring. Especially when I'm trying to be a little bit more aggressive with my termination in the spring, and then had to come back in and respray. And I wasn't a fan of that. So I kind of like to stick to the annual ryegrass that I know and I love, but that annual ryegrass that I know and love has limitations.

So I try not to just throw that money out there if I don't think I'm going to be able to maximize it. But I absolutely love annual ryegrass. It's one of the best cover crops. It gets a lot of absolute, a lot of people say a lot of bad things about it. They just haven't found a variety that works well for their management styles and that works all the time. And it's so stinking cheap. So in front of corn, we like to use low rate, just low rates, and we're still able to manage that just fine in the spring. With the strip-till it really builds in an insurance plan. So I don't have anything growing right next to that baby corn plant. And then now when we come back in and we strip fresh in the spring, if there is a few rye plants that happen to be growing in that strip in the spring, well, it gets pulverized when I create that seedbed and it's a nonissue. Now, that's for corn, for spring, it's still just a bushel of cereal rye per acre.

And that's just a year-in year-out thing for us. And then we try to maximize that cereal rye in the spring. Ahead of beans because beans don't seem to care one bit about that cereal rye being there. And we really try to maximize our biomass on the bean years and we play it more conservatively on the corn years. And that has just been much more of a year-in, year-out, every acre type of a plan. Now there's obviously still farms and there's still years where we'll get more aggressive. And we'll let things go a little bit or we'll be trying to target a specific goal on a farm here or there. But as a whole, year-in and year-out, it's just been simplifying, simplifying, simplifying, find what we can manage. And we'll keep the playing and the experimenting to a few certain fields chasing a few certain goals. So just made it simpler and easier and we're still getting the results that we're looking for.

Hey, keeping it simple is the way to go often. So ahead of strip-till corn, let me just make sure I'm getting it right. So ahead of strip-till corn, you use annual ryegrass?

I love to use annual ryegrass, but I also use cereal rye. So I like to say that I use, I call it a Seagram's seven and seven. So it's seven pounds of cereal rye. It's seven pounds of annual ryegrass. So it's a very small blend of both, and I really like that. I'm not able to use it and year-out now I have to use a little bit of cereal rye in order to act as a big brother for the annual ryegrass. Because the annual ryegrass, sometimes since it's so low to the ground and depending on cold snaps and depending on temperatures and depending on snowfall, that cereal rye acts as a big brother to help protect that annual ryegrass. It helps it over winter a little bit better. And then that cereal rye, there's not a whole lot of it. So when I go in and spray, I don't have a whole bunch of biomass of cereal rye protecting the annual ryegrass in the spring for spraying. So that annual ryegrass still gets herbicide on it and still gets terminated.

And low rates. Using those low rates, I'm still getting the benefits that I want. And because now instead of being across the whole field, you're thinking now it's only in a 22-inch strip. So when we start talking about cutting rates, well, I just took eight inches of that strip out of play for that cover crop. Now, instead of it being across the whole field, now I'm going over 22 inches of field. And so that rate is actually a little bit higher in that strip.

Gotcha.

That no-till strip. So yeah, you kind of have to see the whole picture.

And you're applying the cover crop mix ahead of corn. Are you still doing that in the fall before you make strips or in the summer?

Yeah, I like to do that. So we're just broadcasting a hundred pounds of potash as a carrier. We're dry spreading that and then I'm doing fall strips after that.

Okay, so the cover crops go on with the potash?

Yep.

I see.

And that potash is used as the carrier for that cover crop.

All right. And then-

That's working on a year-by-year, field-by-field thing. Right now it's not the best system in the world, but it works for our logistics and it works for our time management and it works year in and year out on every field for us right now.

Sounds good. And then after you plant the corn, are you terminating with glyphosate or...

Yeah, we're still using glyphosate as a carrier, as a terminate for those cover crops. We're not having issues as long as we follow the rules of termination for annual ryegrass. Obviously if cereal rye gets a whiff of ground up, it's going to die, but...

Gotcha. All right.

Have not had a lot of issues.

All right, so we just went down the cover crop roads. Let's go back onto the strip-till and the nutrient management highway that we were on before. So are you applying most of your nutrients with the strip-till bar or how do you split that up? Do you do some with the planter? Or...

Yeah, so dad was pretty adamant about taking all the nutrients, all the liquid off the planter. So you got a little bit of fall anhydrous, which we've cut that rate back tremendously. And then we've applying a lot of our nutrients on with the spring strip freshener bar, liquid. And then we plan, and then any other nutrients that we do in season is all determined based off of soil and leaf tests.

And so for 2024 as an example, did you make a lot of in-season applications this past growing season?

No, I did not. I did not. 20-20 hindsight tells me that the environmental conditions probably were right, but the economics... Just, I wasn't comfortable with the economics when we had... If you think about it from a whole situation, we had go from just say 650 and it went down to 450. Right? So we lost $2 on corn throughout that summer when I was making those decisions. And I did not pull the trigger. And we had some of the best corn yields that we've ever had. If I would have done it, I don't know if I would have gotten even better results. I'm not exactly for sure.

And how do you apply those in-season nutrients? Do you have a side dress rig or a drone or something?

So we have used drones. And shoot, we've even spread cover crops with drones and staining corn too. So we've done that. Neighbors have those drones, but no. High Boy wide drop machines is still the preferred method.

Gotcha. What's your nitrogen philosophy? How much nitrogen per bushel are you usually shooting for?

I think that's always a moving target, but I would say that we're adding on about... Oh, I think grand total all in, we're approximately 175 pounds of nitrogen per acre, growing anywhere from 220 to 280 bushels of corn. Some fields are better than others. Some hybrids we pick better and some fields have just better potential. Yeah, we're right around that 175. I don't know. I would say maybe just say if you want to make it for an easy average, maybe 250 corn.

Gotcha. Okay.

But I wouldn't say that I'm looking at a ratio. I used to really worry about ratios and that's not the ratio that I worry about so much anymore.

Going back to the strip-tail bar, how many rows is it?

16, 16, 16. Fall 16, spring 16, plant 16.

And you're in 30-inch rows.

30-inch rows.

And about how deep do you make your strips?

In the fall, we're about six inches. In the spring, about an inch and a half.

All right. And then what brand strip freshener did you buy for the new one?

We just bought brand new Yetter CCs. So we're 30 minutes from Macomb.

Oh, you're right by their headquarters.

Yes. Dad and I went up there and talked to Andy Thompson for about three hours. And we just went through it all and we were already leaning that direction. We've been leaning that direction for a while, but we talked with him and realized that is the route that we definitely wanted to take, and so that's what we did.

Yeah, Andy's a great guy. He's very knowledgeable.

Yep. And I wanted to talk to Andy because I wanted his knowledge and that's all. As I said earlier, we're constantly trying to acquire information and experience. And you go and talk to those people that have that experience and information.

So what does your dad think about strip-till? He's pretty much all on board with it?

So beforehand we weren't ready to spend a whole bunch of money and we weren't ready to spend... We were putting about as much emphasis on it as how much money we put into it. That's one way to look at it. And we didn't put a whole lot of money into it. And so it was a thing, it was a concept. And we were trying to prove the concept that he wanted to see it all work before we started pumping money into it. And now we're pumping money into it. So obviously the concept is there. The concept has been proven. We really like what we see and we're ready to make improvements on everything. So yeah, he's on board. He's on board.

Okay, good to hear. How much of a approximate yield bump did you get switching from no-till to strip-till corn, on average?

Well, there's a lot of other factors at play, obviously. But over the course of the last several years, we have probably increased our yields by 20 to 40 as an average. Some fields are a little bit better than that and some are not quite that high. But there's other factors at play, right?

Oh yeah, yeah. Weather and all that.

Yep. And just conditions and improvements to your planter, and dialing in nutrient plans and yada yada yada. So there's more factors at play, but the strip-till offers us more of a comprehensive nutrient plan. And so that's another avenue that I really like about it, especially when we had liquid on that spring stripper bar. I am able to do things that I wasn't able to do with the liquid on the planter. I can put more product down per acre. I can put them in different spots. I don't have to worry about seedling issues or getting that mix too hot or too close to the planter. So yeah, and then I only have to just worry about planting.

Yeah, I'm glad you reminded me, because I meant to ask you about your planter. So what kind of planter do you have and do you have any unique bells and whistles on it?

Nope. Nope. It's a pretty standard planter. We have eSet meters. Other than that, we have Yetter twisters that I think, not another shameless plug for Yetter, but the Yetter twisters had made a massive improvement. I really like that closing system wheel, or you could say copperhead for cruisers or whatever, but I really like those. They work really well for us. eSet's down pressure, but it's pretty standard plain jane planter. But because I'm not worrying about that liquid system, I spend a little bit more time in just fine-tuning that planter and getting it and the best shape it can be. And we just don't have issues.

16 row planter?

Yep.

And then what-

Boxes. I still love my boxes. I love my boxes on corn planter. It's daylight.

And what brand is it?

John Deere.

John Deere. Okay. All right, well I think I've covered most of the questions on my list here. Here's another one for you, though. What would you say is one of the biggest strip-till lessons learned so far in your strip-till journey?

I used to think that building the perfect fall strip meant the world. And if I had a perfect fall strip that I wouldn't have to do anything and come in and I could have everything in that zone and I could just come in and plant in the spring. The problem with building a perfect fall strip is because we're putting on fall anhydrous, you're kind of sometimes limited, based on the time zone to build the false strip. And sometimes in the fall we were having wet falls and I wasn't building this beautiful fall strip per se, that was just absolutely gorgeous.

And I absolutely love the look of that perfect fall strip. I do, but I guess I used to hold that as the most weight and now I would sacrifice a fall strip for an average strip in the fall and make that spring pass my bread and butter. Because that spring pass, on that freshener pass, I would rather that be the perfection. I would rather that be my perfection. Because that's actually what I'm planting my seed into. And so yeah, I have changed from "fall is best" to "give it to me all in the spring." And I would rather have a beautiful spring strip that I plant directly into.

Interesting. And you're still shank in the fall, culture in the spring?

Yeah. Shark teeth in the spring. Yep.

How long do you have to wait to plant after you do the strip freshener in the spring? Do you have to wait a couple days or can you do it right away?

Yeah, so the last few years, what we've been doing... It's been too cold to plant, but the conditions were good. So we were running our spring freshener, putting down our liquid. And we would finish that and unhook the freshener. And then we would hook onto the corn planter. And then we would be able to decide from there whether or not we're going to be planting. But we've had really good spring conditions. It's just the ground was a little too cold and the forecast was a little too cold. So we've been able to spring strip, spring freshen, and then plant a day later and then just start planting. There is also years in the past four years where my dad, I was freshening and dad was planting and we were in the same field at the exact same time.

So that's also really kind of cool that we were able to do that. It made it as a logistical nightmare a little bit when it comes to 8 rows. Yeah, every year's different, but I would like to get all my freshening done and then go hook onto the planter and go. And then that job is done, but I have no problem... Start freshening, get a couple fields ahead, and then the planter's rolling right behind me. Every year is going to be a little bit different, but the job's already done and the job's done well.

All right, I think that's all the questions I have for you. Anything I'm leaving out or anything else you want to add about your system?

Yeah... You can call back in four years and the whole thing might be different, right? So that's the beauty of always adapting and always changing and always growing and always trying something different and always tweaking. So the principles are there and the principles will always be there until we rewrite the principles. So I guess I don't get too worried about stuff. I know what the general plan is, and we just go and we tackle the job. And so after that we're always able to adjust on the fly. And building that ability to adjust on the fly is what makes everything versatile. And I don't have to have six different pieces of equipment laying around. We can do it all with one or two or three.

That'll wrap things up. Thanks to Andrew for taking the time to talk to us on his headset as he hauls grain all day. Safe travels out there, Andrew. Thanks so much to Yetter for making the podcast series possible and thank you for tuning in as always. Until next time, for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.dot.com.