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On this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, Shawn Olsen shares how he strip-tills his own 4,500-acres before custom strip-tilling another 20,000 acres in Hayti, S.D.

On top of farming 4,500 acres with his dad, David, brother, Kelly and son, Carter, Shawn Olsen also runs a custom strip-till business that covers up to 25,000 acres in east central South Dakota. The strip-till calendar starts relatively early on Olsen’s farm — he starts making strips as soon as soybean harvest wraps up in late September.

Olsen explains how he’s able to cover so much ground in such a short amount of time, details his approach to making strips and maximizing nutrient use efficiency in the fall and explains why strip-till is on the rise in his neck of the woods. 

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, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. I'm your host, Technology Editor Noah Newman, and today, we are covering 25,000 acres with Hayti, South Dakota Strip-Tiller Shawn Olsen. He explains how he was able to cover so much ground in the fall and also details his approach to making strips and maximizing nutrient use efficiency and explains why strip-till is really on the rise in his neck of the woods. Let's jump right in here, Shawn.

Four of us, it'd be my dad, David Olsen, my brother, Kelly Olsen, myself, Shawn Olsen, and my son, Carter Olsen. Between the four of us, we work together and we farm approximately 4,500 acres, and we grow corn and soybeans. And our rotation is probably anywhere from a 50/50 rotation up to probably 70% corn on the high end of those rotation years, which commodity prices would dictate our rotation that way, to have more corn and less soybeans. No cattle. So we are strictly a corn, soybean raising operations.

And you're in South Dakota, is that right?

Yes. Yep, yep. We are in, I would say East Central South Dakota.

What town?

Town of Hayti, H-A-Y-T-I.

Hayti. Hayti, South Dakota.

Correct, yep. Hayti, South Dakota. We're about halfway up the state between Nebraska and North Dakota and we are probably 40 miles west of the Minnesota border.

And what would you say are some of the unique weather challenges you deal with or soil challenges and how does strip-till kind of help address those?

It seems like our strip-till, we get the quote-unquote, "benefits" of no-till situations with retaining soil moisture, I'm talking versus conventional tillage. So strip-till practicing, we are able to minimize soil erosion because of the benefit of having residue on the top of the ground. Between rain or wind, I would say wind mainly over the winter months when we don't have any snow cover, like this winter is exactly. And the tillage part of the strip-till allows our soil to warm in the spring versus no-till and it allows us to band our nutrients. So they're placed right under where we're going to plant the corn so that the efficiencies of the corn plant utilizing the nutrients I guess is why we strip-till. And we have seen benefits in yield, we've seen yield increase with strip-till and I would attribute that to nutrient placement more so than a moisture savings over a broadcast application with tillage to incorporate the nutrients.

And have you been able to cut down on the number of nutrients you're using since you started strip-tilling?

We have probably been strip-tilling for... Let's see. 2001 is when I graduated from high school. My brother and I, we each had farmed an 80-acre piece of ground separately from each other before my graduation. So I would say like 19 98, 99 is when we first tried strip-till, and we did not cut our nutrients at that time, and our corn yields increased over the acres that we did not strip-till on year one by 20 bushels. And we have found that over... As the years have gone by, we have tried cutting our applied rates by 5, 10, 15, 20%. And what we found in our farm is I think a guy can cut according to a soil sample recommendation by 10%, 10 to 15, no more than 15% when you're banding with strip-till and achieve the same yields.

But we have found that our return on investment, we have not cut, we're staying with the broadcast recommendations on soil samples. That's on our own farm trials side by side, cutting 10, 15% versus going with the recommendation off of a soil sample. And we have increased yields and there is more than enough return on that investment, I guess if you'd like to call it that, to apply that rate of product according to the soil sample without cutting that rate.

Yeah. So are you soil sampling once before every growing season or in growing season or how are you pulling your soil samples and interpreting them?

So we have not done any verbal rate on our soil on the ground that we farm, and I guess that's just personal preference from grower to grower on methods of sampling. So I guess you would call ours a composite sample. So they are sampling. Our local cooperative samples for us and they're sampling by the same GPS coordinate year after year. So they're going back to the same spots and we're just going off of field composites, it is what we're using I guess. And then we do that in the fall right after the soybean harvest or wherever we're going to strip-till for corn for the next year. And I guess that's how we do it.

I gotcha. And then I know it's different probably for all the farms that you do custom strip-till on, but for your farm, what is your nutrient management plan looking like? Can you kind of take us through that, when you're applying nutrients and how much and how you're applying them?

So as far as your four main nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sulfur, we're using all dry products and we're using urea for nitrogen and we mainly use MAP 11-52-0 is our form of phos, and potash for potassium, and AMS is what we use for our sulfur. And we're applying approximately 15 to 20% higher than the recommendation for our phosphorus and potassium levels just for the fact that we at times would like that benefit to be there for added corn yield and then followed by a sample after corn and there may be enough left there where we don't have to apply for a soybean crop, so we're saving a pass so to say, if that makes sense.

And our nitrogen, we apply 50% of our nitrogen in the strip-till in the fall and we're treating that with a product called Instinct, a below-ground treatment to stabilize the nitrogen because we are actually applying our strip-till, I would say most guys would consider too early, the ground is warm, so our ground temp may be in the 60s because I guess I'm moving into the part of logistics. And being able to strip-till the amount of acres that need to be covered in the fall, we're doing our own ground on the early side and using some stabilizers for the nitrogen, which has worked well. I guess we haven't found any from tissue sampling and soil sampling in season. We have not found ourselves to be short of nitrogen in the later growing season, so that has helped with our decisions to keep applying on the early side for the logistic reason of being able to cover as many acres as we can on the custom side come fall when all the growers are ready to start applying.

Yeah, okay. So you're doing 50% of your nitrogen in the fall, so you're applying that with the strip-till rig right after soybean harvest or?

Yes.

Right after soybean harvest?

Yep, and I would say on the average date that we start our soybean harvest in our area would be September 20th, early 20s would be on the early side of harvest if we got a dry hot fall, summer, depending on soybean maturity obviously too. But yeah, I would say that we will go as soon as our samples come back, which only takes two or three days early fall because the labs aren't as busy at that time. So our turnaround is real quick, so we'll start our own strip-till in September 25th I would guess. As the soybeans are harvested, we're right behind the combine with the strip-till applying our product.

And it sounds like that's worked really well for you, but how deep do you make your strips?

We're trying to shoot for no deeper than eight inches. So if I'm out in the field behind the machine and as you're digging around behind the strip-till bar, as you brush the soil berm that the strip to makes, if you brush that and the residue away so you're laying on the flat surface and measure down to the bottom of your tillage trench, which generally is where your fertilizer is going to be laying in a band in the lower portion of that tillage. If the tillage is six to eight inches, that's where I preferably like to see the tillage and fertilizer placement. And we found by mistake one spring that on an 80 acre piece on our own ground, we had mistakenly not had got our cylinder stops put back in and the strip-till was done at about 12 or 13 inches deep and with the excessive rain that we had to follow planting that year, and it was a wet summer, a cool wet summer, it seemed like the rip mass of the corn plants couldn't keep up with the leaching, I would call it from the nitrogen going down.

So we had to top dress and apply some more nitrogen. That's the reason why I guess we've come up with that depth. Is there a perfect depth? I would say no. You want enough depth so you can do enough tillage to make a decent berm with your strip-till for the planter and you want some cover on your fertilizer too. I just think six to eight inches is better than two to four inches and obviously what we found is better than 12 plus inches deep.

Gotcha. So six to eight is that sweet spot. So in the spring, when are you coming back with the strip-till rig to apply the rest of your nutrients?

So in the springtime, the only thing that we need to apply would be the other half of our nitrogen and we do it really early on in the season, is we use an above-ground treatment and we actually broadcast that dry nitrogen treated with AGROTAIN, which is an above-ground treatment. So we spread that on with a spreader when the corn is up and you can row it. It's real early V3, V4 stage in the corn because it seems like in our area, that it rains a lot more often, May, June are chances of rain and getting that nitrogen to be incorporated with the water, with rain. If we wait till late in the season, we can have some weather patterns in our area where if you're going to use dry product, it's quite the risk even being treated because we can go three to four to up to six weeks with heat and without rain.

It sounds like a long time, but I mean we've seen it many times and the crop seems to hold on if there's adequate subsoil until you get that timely rain sometime in July or August. Now I think if a guy was using a single coulter with a liquid 28%, then a guy could maybe wait a little longer than we do in the growing season to apply that nitrogen. But that's our reasons of why we're just trying to eliminate some risk and we have a better chance of rain I guess earlier in the season.

Ah, makes sense. Oh, so you're only making one strip-till pass that's in the fall, you're not making one in the spring?

Correct. That's correct.

And the one in the fall, you're also applying the P, the K and the sulfur as well?

Yes. Yep.

I got you. And then anything else in season, any other applications or usually is that it after you spread the rest of that nitrogen?

That would be it. Yep, that's it for us. I guess how we do it on our farm, that would be the end.

Yeah, it saves you a lot of different passes it sounds like. Looking for innovative solutions to maximize your farm's productivity? Look no further than Yetter Farm Equipment. We're dedicated to providing farmers with the highest quality equipment from row cleaners and closing wheels to fertilizer equipment, strip-till units and stock devastators. Yetter has the tools you need to optimize your farming operation. Visit Yetterco.com to learn more and find the dealer near you. That's Y-E-T-T-E-R-C-O.com. Now back to the podcast. So tell us about your strip-till rig, what brand is it, how big is it? What does it look like? Kind of paint the picture for us.

So for many years, when I started, I've been doing this for probably 20 years now, the custom strip-till. I'll just back up one more time. When we started, we hired a local co-op for the first two or three years until we started realizing the benefits of strip-till. Like I mentioned, all the efficiencies, whether it's your nutrient placement, the corn plant efficiencies or where the nutrients are places to tillage passes, eliminating the cost of operation. We're eliminating so many passes and then come in the spring, we were always, I shouldn't say always, there were times when you're checking your soil conditions like anywhere in the US, I would imagine, the field's ready. So you call your local cooperative with instructions on which pieces need to be spread and at what rates and then that depends on where you're at on the list. It might be that day, it might be one day, it might be three days later.

So missing that perfect window of opportunity to plant is I guess what I'm probably getting at. So there's a lot of benefits that we've noticed with this. Now getting to your question, when we started, for one year, I had bought a used Blue-Jet I believe it was, and there was no row cleaners and no soil conditioning, rolling basket to condition the soil. So it was a pretty crude way of... We were placing the nutrients where we wanted, but the berms were crude, they were not all the same, the rows were not all the same size and shape of berm and they were filthy with residue on them. So the soil temp in the spring was inconsistent and then I bought some Case-IH, I think they were a 5310 Case-IH and I started with one and ended up going to two 16 rows and then ended up with a two 24 row.

They were 60 foot, 24 row 30 inch and one 16 row 30 inch, which would be 40 foot. And we were using their air seeder parts for the fertilizer delivery part of it and we did that for probably 15 years. We had them tool bars which worked great. They had row cleaners and they had a rolling basket for conditioning the soil. So our strip-till, the tillage part was they were cleaner, there was less clods or chunks of soil in them, and then with freeze and thaw, they would mellow out real nice and it was good plant again. And now, the last, oh boy, what's it been, three years, I have traded those and I have owned the Lynx strip-till bar. And we replaced three machines with two. So our efficiencies went up with the Lynx tool bar to where we eliminated a home machine and we are covering at a minimum the same acres and weather dependent.

One of the years, we had covered probably 10% more acres than we ever did with three of the Case-IH or DMI you would call machines that we were running. And why that is because they were robust machine in every way. They're heavy duty built, they handle numerous conditions, whether it's soybean stubble, wheat stubble, alfalfa kill-out, corn stalks, you guys want to call it corn on corn. We take them into all conditions. Maintenance on them is 95% less than what we were doing with our previous machines. Loading time is probably 90% more efficient also. The fertilizer delivery and capacity is probably 30% more than what we had before. So I guess talking efficiencies in every way. And the reason for me that I didn't do this earlier was probably like everybody else, it's a so-called sticker shock, I guess, when guys are pricing machines. And the Lynx machine was more expensive, but after using them for three years now, it turns out that my cost per acre to run them is less than what I was doing before.

Wow, those are 24 row bars you said, correct?

So right now I have one 24 row and one 16 row machine.

And so that seems like that'd be a good piece of advice for people that are getting started in strip-tills that you might see that sticker shock of a bar, but if you get the right equipment for your operation, it sounds like, I mean that could make a big difference in the amount of money you're saving and the amount of work you're able to get done in a quick amount of time.

Yeah. And nowadays, outside of strip-till, it doesn't matter on the farm operations that any iron is a huge cost, and we're just all trying to minimize those costs without giving something up. When I say we, I think farmers, we can't... It's hard to afford everything at one time. To me it seems like you could throw everybody in that boat. But to become this efficient at doing it and eliminating tillage passes or machinery, whether that would be eliminating one or two tractors on some operations, labor, it seems like farms, they're producing more per acre, whatever commodity they're growing, there's more labor involved, whether that's more trips back and forth with the trucks during harvest.

And it seems like windows, just that they feel like they get smaller as years go by and then you get weather, whether it's harvest or planting. And when the windows and opportunities hit us, we like to be prepared and ready without having to wait for the co-op to spread our fertilizer and then go do our tillage pass and then let that dry off for another day before you're out there with your planter. And with this method of farming with strip-till, essentially when our combine leaves and the strip-tiller is done, the next time we're out there is with the corn planter. I guess we're prepared and ready. So when that magical day and hour comes by in the spring, we're able to be there.

Now this custom strip-till business, that's got to keep you pretty busy in the fall. About how many acres of custom strip-till are you doing and how much has the business grown over the past several years would you say?

I would say that the business, we're probably maxed out between our labor and machines that we're using right now and we're covering between 15 and 20,000 acres in the fall between these two machines and that's depending on weather. So that's depending on the start date and an end date. With a little sarcasm, in this business, with the custom strip-till, the only one that I can guarantee will get done will be the first one we do. And after that, it depends on the growers, it depends on soil sampling. You can start back actually number one with their harvest, depends on how soon, how quick they can get their soybeans off the field because that's a lot of what we're in, is applying in soybean stubble, and then it's agronomists that are soil sampling.

So waiting for soil recommendations or fertilizer recommendations from soil sampling to everything falling in mind, to getting the phone call that this piece is ready to go, and then you mix the weather in with it and we don't know when it's going to rain, snow and freeze, if it's going to be Halloween or November 5th or 10th or Thanksgiving. There's been a couple of years we've been able to apply into December, a week into December. So the end date is the only thing we don't know.

So just making sure that the machines run every day I guess is what we try to do seven days a week. And they do not run 24 hours. We probably run them, I would say they're in the ground moving by 7:00 AM and until 10:00 PM so 15 hours they get, and then maintenance, our fueling or greasing is done either in the morning before we start or in the evening after we quit. So to keep that operation in the same hours as the co-ops that are delivering product to the field for these growers. The overnight, we tried that one year and it just seems like we end up with a lot of trouble overnight and then if you get a couple guys burning the candle on both ends, it didn't seem to work out quite so good. We may do it one or two nights at the end of the season if you know that the forecast shows the ground's going to freeze up.

So when you're in that last day or two of operation, whether that's to finish the grower we're on or maybe it's a rainstorm, maybe it's a snowstorm. It's all happened to us where you try to empty your machine or empty the semi-load of fertilizer that's in the field. Other than that, it seems like a 15-hour day seems to average out most days and with the Lynx machine, I guess they've been trouble-free. They've just been really efficient for us to run and has allowed us to cover those acres, 15,000 to 20,000 in the fall, and then in the spring, seems like anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 in the springtime.

So have you noticed a rise in popularity for strip-till recently and where do you see it going? You see more people doing it?

I do, yep. There are a few government programs out, where there's payments available for certain farming practices. That might push a little bit of it, but in my opinion, I think it's just guys that try it and they see the benefits of improved soil structure, and it seems like I keep saying the word efficient and that's what it is. It's cheaper. They find out it's cheaper for us to come and strip-till at $34 an acre than it is for two tillage passes and a fertilizer broadcast application, one to two passes that they're making. It seems in our area, I'm averaging the conventional way of doing it between $50 and $55 an acre I suppose, and we're at $34, but like I said, the other benefits that come with that is the timing in the spring for planting.

So besides the benefit of a lower cost per acre for the tillage and fertilizer placement is they're not waiting on anybody come spring, they're ready to go plant when that right day shows up for them to plant. And on top of that, there's a yield benefit versus a conventional. The closest we've ever found in our farm trials, which we did for five years versus a broadcast fertilizer with a full tillage program on a cool wet year, the strip-till was seven bushels higher yielding than the conventional pass, and the corn was 1% drier at harvest. And on a dry, droughty year, we have seen it up to 40 bushels more than a conventional broadcast and tillage program. On an average, I would have to say it would be in that 15 bushel range.

Wow. So the numbers say it all and it seems like a much more resilient system, like how you pointed out how 40 bushels better in a drought year. I mean that's a staggering number right there.

It is, and we have done that on different farms. We've done it with guys that they want to... Maybe they have a hog barn where they've got some liquid hog manure, where they've applied that to half of a field and we've strip-tilled the other half. I know there's one grower that won't use his own hog manure anymore. It's all strip-tilled now. There's a bigger return on after paying the strip-till application and buying the commercial fertilizer, there's a bigger return than what he was getting out of his hog manure. We've tried it versus dairy manure. We've tried it versus no-till, we've tried it versus the conventional tillage with broadcast, and it seems to be the highest yielding method. Fertilizer placement tillage strip-till is what we have found on our farm.

Now to throw in there, if there's a grower that has a very tight soil, very heavy, very tight, poorly drained soil, and if they end up strip-tilling for the first time and they end up with a cold wet spring, they're not going to be happy with the results because they could be out there with some light tillage trying to dry out the ground because the strip-till is doing its job, it's going to retain a little more moisture. That's about the only condition that I can find where guys maybe might be turned off of the idea. But like anything else that growers would do, if you set something up for failure, you can't expect much more than that I guess.

I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to ask you, in all your strip-till experiences to give some advice or something to look out for, a potential road bump that first time strip-tillers might run into. And it sounds like that's it that, if you get a bad spring, I mean there's nothing you can really do about that though.

Nope, and that's something that we can't control. Now, we do farm some heavier, tighter soils that we have tiled, so there is surface drainage, but in times, that's not enough. And if you get the wrong weather in the spring, it's not conducive for an early planting or on-time planting. If it's a cooler, wet spring without any drainage, strip-till, they're going to fight it a little bit. That's just what's going to happen. I've seen it. It's not the strip-till's fault because we've seen the guys that have done that, you go right across the fence line, which would be the same soil type, that guy had chisel plowed, so he had full tillage from the fall before, and he was still out working his ground in wet conditions.

The field was just as wet as the strip-till, but maybe inside, they felt that there was no added cost because they had to do tillage anyways in the spring, and they thought maybe they were helping their soil condition by that light tillage pass in the spring that they had to do anyways. So that's probably the only situation I've seen from the tillage end of it that guys maybe would be a little skeptical going forward from there, is if you put it in a spot that's a high risk of failure, you can't expect much more than what you're giving it to start.

And there you go. Thanks a lot to Shawn Olsen for joining us this week on the podcast. Thanks again to our sponsor, Yetter Farm Equipment, for making this series possible and thank you for tuning in as always. Until next time, for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. Have a great day.