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On this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, Charles City, Va., strip-tiller David Hula shares the keys to his strip-till success.

David Hula recently captured his 13^th NCGA High Yield Contest title with a 490-bushel yield in the strip-till irrigated class — nothing new for the third-generation farmer, who remains the only one to break the 600-bushel mark (2019, 2021 and 2023).

Fresh off his record-breaking 623-bushel yield, Hula opened his playbook during a Q&A session at the 2024 National Strip-Tillage Conference. Let’s listen in to the conversation.

Early Bird registration is currently underway for the 2025 National Strip-Tillage Conference, which takes place July 31-August 1 in Iowa City!

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

Hey, great to have you with us for another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. I'm technology editor Noah Newman. Today, Charles City, Virginia strip-tiller David Hula shares some of the keys to his strip-till success. He recently captured his 13th NCGA High Yield Contest title with a 490 bushel yield in the strip-till irrigated class. But that's nothing new for the third generation farmer who remains the only one to ever break the 600 bushel mark. He did it three times. 2019, 2021, and 2023. And fresh off that record-breaking 623 bushel yield, Hula opened up his playbook during a Q&A session at the 2024 National Strip-Tillage Conference. Let's listen into the conversation.

Hi. I'm curious what you use the small tank on the SoilWarrior for, and if you've had any success with it yet.

Okay. Three bin machine. We used to have a two bin machine. I kind of wish we still had a two bin machine because it's a pain in the butt when you try to put three different products in it. And we're using a tender. Nutrient is my fertilizer provider. I could get two products in their tender but I can't get the third one. But the small one is where we put the humic acid. We like to do 10 to 15 pounds of humic acid. And then the two bigger tanks is where we put our traditional product. And every acre of corn we have that we run the SoilWarrior gets the same product. We variable the humic acid. We get 100 pounds AMS. We put 150 pounds of MAP out there and we put 300 pounds of 0-0-60. We do not do it in the fall. It's always done in the spring because if we do it in the fall, I told you what my CECs are. All that fertilizer's going to disappear.

We don't do any boron. The other one thing that I do say, and I forgot to include this: for every pound of phosphorus we're adding a portion of zinc because we know there's a phosphorus to zinc ratio. The academics and industry says a 10 to 12 to one. We're focusing on eight-to-one. So for every eight pounds of phosphorus, we're putting a pound of zinc because we know that gives you another little thing. Anybody here pull tissue samples? Y'all pull tissue samples? You pull a corn tissue sample at 350 GDUs. There's only one nutrient you need to look at. I'm not going to tell you what the number is. Look at phosphorus. And that nutrient right there is going to tell you whether you got a crop that's going to do really good or it's just a crop that you already know how to grow. When I look at that, I can say, "Game on," or, "This is production corn."

A question on nitrogen piece. Probably since we've been starting doing strip-till, that's our biggest concern. We're putting on with the planter and the side dress. Thoughts around nitrogen? Going forward, what you're doing, what's working. I know you're in a little different soils in Minnesota, but...

Nitrogen with the strip-till?

Nope. We're putting nitrogen on with the planter, 28%. And 28% with the side-dress rig.

Yep.

And the only nitrogen we get is in the fall with our dry. 20, 25 pounds.

I'm not a big fan of putting broadcast nitrogen out on our... everybody heard that question? Yeah, because it went across the speaker. We do not broadcast any nitrogen except on our small grain. We put it in bands. When I'm making a nitrogen application, I am applying it to do a specific thing. Am I trying to make more rows around? I'm trying to make length or am I trying to make weight? We do put nitrogen down with the air planter. We're putting 66 pounds of nitrogen with the John Deere and, dang it, what is it? Concealed. Thank you.

So we got one on one side deep because we're putting... we actually use a 66-33-00 sulfur, boron, and zinc. And we want the phosphorus deep. I don't care about where the conceal's going, an inch, inch and a quarter down. Surely we got phosphorus in that, because we're just splitting it, but the nitrogen and sulfur and boron's going to wash down in the root zone. Then I do put that 100 pounds AMS down with the strip-till and then whatever nitrogen comes down with the MAP, which is not a huge amount. Broadcasting, now, there is some thoughts. And I'm not going to argue with this. Broadcast a little bit of nitrogen and sulfur in front of your corn crop to stimulate biology.

You're in Minnesota. How much biology is working just before you plant corn? So why not feed it and do something in the strip and/or feed it with your stuff on the side placement with your planter? And then we dribble on the side. We use easy drops now because I'm big in the side placement. Nitrogen, potash, sulfur, boron, moly, zinc, humic acid. That's real, y'all. You talk efficiency now. We can talk a lot about digging between the corn rows. Where are the roots? How deep are they before they... how close are they to the surface? There's a lot of fertility there that you're not using. That's why I like strip-tilling. But we don't strip-till every acre. All right, another question. Yes sir.

I want to hear about your bad soils, the problem soils that you have. What are you doing to bring them up to par?

Turn them into solar panels. I'm just kidding. We haven't done solar panels yet. We get asked a lot because we got transmission lines. I don't own any of the real bad stuff. We do have some loamy sand that, if there was water there, it would strictly be a beach. On those type of soils, and we're talking 2:1 CCs. That 1:7 or 1:9 I was talking about, that's cash-rented. It's hard to build that stuff up. So we strictly focus on stripping that. We do not broadcast any fertilizer. We don't really plant much small grain on that ground because we do some cover crops. That's another thing that we like to do on the tougher ground. And then we're just managing it for now.

Would you even entertain farming ground that's got 120 bushel yield goal? That's what it is. Now, if we get plenty of rain, we've seen 200 bushel, but we've also seen 30 bushel corn. So we lower population on that to where, I don't go below 20,000 because then we start getting weed pressure. That's our cutoff. This year we're lucky to have corn on that ground, and I'm going to say we'll probably be in that 42, 45 bushel average on 90-some acres. I am a proponent of putting humic acid to try to stimulate biology, because they will do stuff. Long-term, if I were to own that, we have been applying some humic acids. Cover crops are good. And then we want to try to get some chicken litter on it. The old traditional biology. Do you all realize? Think about it, that 150, 125, 200 Century Farms, y'all had livestock.

Y'all were doing biology. You had manure, you spread it out, and then you farmed it. Then we got into where we were trying to do more acres. We got rid of livestock. Well, what are we doing now? We're back reintroducing biology to this dirt. We're just paying for it in a different way. That ground that we're dealing with, it's up for sale. It's going to be houses one day. So it's going to turn into brick and mortar. All right, another question. Okay,

Good morning.

Good morning.

My question is regarding the population increase. And another question is, if you split the fertilizer and you're using irrigation system, would you split the fertilizer through your irrigation system? And if that's the case, how many times? And then the second question through population is, if you're increasing population, would you also considering increasing the amount of fertilizer according to the population?

Sure.

Thank you.

Okay. Nutrition. We're on Chesapeake Bay. We have to follow a nutrient management plan. So we're strip-tilling all we can broadcast fertilizer. I elect to strip-till. Way more efficient. And then we put starter down with their planter. Then as soon as the planter can get start side-dressing corn, we will. The reason I say, "As soon," we got small grain, we got soybeans, we got corn. We got one sprayer. Cropping the acres that we do, that sprayer's doing crop protection stuff, killing insects on small grain, spraying herbicides on bean and/or corn. And then the side-dressing time is what comes... that's the last thing. That's not the biggest focus because we just put 66 pounds of nitrogen with the planter.

It can carry the crop to V8 or V9 before it runs out, unless we get a bunch of rain. Then we start side-dressing as soon as we can. We try to do it around V5. Then we come back and side-dress later. The cool thing about having these Y-drops or whatever drop system you have, if y'all continue to get rain, you can go back out there and put some more fertilizer on it. So on arid ground I have 472 acres this year that has not been side-dressed. We were dry. We put two tons of chicken litter out. We had 66 pounds of nitrogen with the planter. That's going to carry me on. It didn't rain. I said, "We're going to side-dress it when it rains." It didn't rain. I saved myself a bunch of money. We got some rain now. We've had about 10 inches in three weeks, and you just saw what's getting ready to happen. Crop looks good, we feel good, but it's still going to be crap.

So we just saved a bunch of money. Now, fertigating, we used to fertigate. We got away from that because I was losing efficiency. I'm all about, I want that application to do something, and I don't want that crop to spend a lot of time and energy on the irrigated stuff, as well as dry land. How many here run some kind of drop? Y-drop, easy drop. Raise your hands. That's way more than I thought. I was in Ames just the other day. Have y'all walked out in your field? That big, old ring of moisture around the base of the plant, that's God's way to wick nutrients in. And that is tremendous. That is huge. Now, populations, as we go up populations, how many pounds of nitrogen does it take to make a bushel of corn? Y'all tell me. I don't know. What does it take? 0.8.

0.5.

Did you say 0.5? You must have litter. You got something going on. Awesome. Well, for easy math, let's just say one pound. If I've got a 200 bushel crop, I know I need 200 pounds of nitrogen. If I've got 300 bushel crop, I've got to have 300 pounds. So the question he asked is, do you put more fertilizer for more yield? If you don't do it, you're... I've been around growers that say, "I want to have more bushels." So what do they do? They plant more seed, but they don't feed it. And what's going to happen? They might pick up a few bushels, but they don't pick up what they're coveting. You got to feed the crop. And it takes nitrogen, it takes potash, it takes sulfur, it takes phosphorus, it takes copper, boron, manganese, all those micronutrients.

I told my son not long ago... and for the younger generation, I'm 61 years old, so I got less years in front of me than I have behind me. He's going to see way more exciting things. He's not going to be buying as much of that N, P, and K. He's going to be buying bugs in a jug that's going to release it. That is going to be incredible, when that happens.

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Question.

You talked about your goal in test weight.

Yeah.

How much can you influence test weight, let's just say from R3 to R5, or where we're at right now?

Sure. Well, first of all, you got to pray for long grain field period. You want to pray for sunlight and you want to make sure you don't have moisture. You got irrigation? All right. Put up a pivot. It's easier said than done. The crop's got to want to do more. You can't make a crop do something it doesn't want to do, but it's got to be in the position to do more. So the question is, you're at R3 right now? It's a loaded question, for me to try to answer that. I can tell you what I would be putting out there, but if you don't have the crop to do it, I don't want you spending money. Last thing I want y'all to do is go home, try something. "That David cost me a pile of money."

I want the phone call to say, "David, you cost me money because I didn't do it on enough acres." That's the call I want. But we need nitrogen, we need sulfur. Those are two. There's a phosphorus uptake curve. Y'all got to understand the uptakes. We're past that one to where we should've been in front of that. I do like some copper and I do like some zinc then. We're still taking potash but the big peak's over. I'm afraid we're past it because now you're going to be flying it on. I want to hit certain things. The one biggest thing that I would say is you need that crop to not be producing any ethylene. So fungicide. Now, there's ethylene blockers out there but I'm a... well, you saw that team player. One of those players on our team is BASF. We like that chemistry because it helps mitigate ethylene.

And without knowing the forecast, we have been... when I started touring and we were at a little bit before the stage you're talking, I'd wake up. It's 84 degrees in the morning. 82 in the morning. 78 in the morning for three weeks. It impacted our pollination and it's impacting our grain fill because we're not getting those cool nights. I don't want it to be hot during the day. Hot days aren't good, but hot nights are horrible. Now, you're in Minnesota? Right here in Wisconsin. All right, so you get cooler temperatures. Yeah, so we got that. Nutrition, the first couple ones would be nitrogen, sulfur. Definitely some zinc. Then we'd talk... yeah, I'm not going to chase rabbits. I don't want you to spend a lot of money and I don't want y'all to think we're going to influence it that way. You've got to stop ethylene, is the other one.

Good morning. Thanks. You had mentioned that litter box of DC. As a producer in the world of carbon and carbon markets, what's your thought? Or are there any practices you're implementing to capture anything? Or what's your two cents on the carbon for farmers today?

Sure. It's a revenue stream, number one. There's some real dollars in it. Do y'all get paid to do cover crop? If you were to get paid... I'm in the seed business, y'all. I want farmers to plant wheat. We used to sell 300 and some thousand units of wheat a year. Last year we sold 37,000. That's not helping that infrastructure, what we got, y'all. It's not about me, but what are they doing? Farmers are planting cover crop because they're getting $110 an acre. Now, y'all can tap into some of that. NRCS is doing it. And then you get into the carbon trade. We as a collective group, there is a tremendous amount of money that somebody's making. We could make more if we would hold out, but I know how farmers are. We ain't going to all hold out. But there is real dollars in carbon. Between carbon, tillage practices, NRCS, at least in their part of the world, is paying real dollars to where right now we could net some over $200 an acre by just government programs.

And then you start to get into carbon. I have not participated in the carbon program yet. I want to make sure we're getting full benefit, because a lot of times you participate and then you've locked it up for a little while. Some of them now it's just an annual thing. I don't want to find myself where we felt like we signed up for something and then we get audited and you hadn't fulfilled what you were doing. So I got a guy named Dustin that we're working with, and we're just trying to make sure we got all our ducks in a row, because we will participate.

Think about a continuous no-till, how much we've been doing there. And then if you really want to get them going, tell them, "All right, so..." because a lot of times they're not rewarding the people that are doing well. Have you all noticed that? The guys that are doing good aren't getting the full benefit. So if that be the case, threaten them. Tell them you're going to pull out a mobile or plow. Say, "Hey, we're going to go back to what we used to do." I'm just playing, y'all. I'm not going to do that. We still own a switch plow. Can't afford to replace it if I needed it.

This question is, when you referenced reducing your phosphorus application by 42%, what was your fertility program before cutting back the P-rate?

Okay. Great question. We fertilize for a rotation. We're corn, small grain, double crop, soybeans. Now, we fertilize heavy potash in front of our corn crop because we know corn is a luxury consumer of potash. So we would be putting out around 400 to 600 pounds of potash. Broadcast, because we're going to do that. The corn crop's going to pick it up, it's going to use it, it's going to decay, be there for small grain. Then when the soybeans are harvested, that's when it leaves. Phosphorus-wise, we do that in front of our small grain crop. And we would be putting roughly 200 pounds of MAP out in front of small grain.

But now, when we've gone to this strip-tilling, we're only putting roughly 80 pounds of MAP out in front of our small grain now just to make sure we don't see that variation in the streaking of the fields. And then, prior to our strip-tilling, we were doing 120... no, let me back up. We were doing 250 pounds broadcast of MAP out in front of our corn crop. Now we're down to that 150 pounds. We've also reduced that potash to the 300 pounds. We still VRT potash based on, we do those one acre grids. So we will cut back on that VRT map because we know where we got it in the strip. So that's how we're doing it. And then nitrogen, we typically don't do much. As I said, we don't broadcast any nitrogen. So it's all in that strip with the ammonium sulfate. All right. Next question.

What depth is ideal for dry fertilizer placement on your soils?

You want it in the root zone. If you're doing phosphorus, which direction do the roots grow? They're growing deeper. Gravity is going to pull. So I want it in the root zone. If we're doing high salts, we don't want to be right there where the seed is. I want to be several inches below the seed, and then we're hoping we get some rain. For us doing the SoilWarrior, we're going only four inches deep. So that whole fertilizer is in that six inch or seven inch band, four inches deep. I'm not trying to go six, eight inches, I don't have enough horsepower. I know John Deere will sell us more but I don't want to buy more. We got a 16 row machine. We're pulling it now with a 8RX 410. And there are times we wish we had more horsepower. Most of the time we don't. So if you're doing a shank to where you're dropping out, make sure it's coming out the bottom, it's not dribbling out the top and spreading it in that shank.

Because if you're actually planted in that shank mark you could get some injury from some salts. So we want to be at least a couple inches below the seed. If we're planting right in front of the planter and we're doing a shank, I might want to go a little deeper because, you get just a little bit of rain to get that stuff into a solution, you're going to burn some roots. You got to be careful. There's an 80 pound salt limit. Remember that. No more than 80 pounds. Take a baseball. Put the center of a baseball. That's where your seed is. You don't want more than 80 pounds in that baseball. Remember that. All right.

When are you planting your cover crops? When are you terminating them? And then how are you managing that residue?

Well, my biggest residue problem is my corn. But small grain, clearly we don't aerial seed anything, so we drill it. Because if we're doing a cover crop, we're focused on really one thing: retrieving nutrients. The other thing is we maybe hold the world together. So where people just broadcast cereals on top of the ground, they're not getting a good root system. You got to seed it. You got to treat it. You got to treat it like a crop. So get it down into the... plant it down deep. And then when do we terminate it? They tell us we can't terminate it by like March 10th or 15th.

I'm not a guy that wants to plant into live cover. To have a 300 bushel crop, you have to have a 300 bushel stand. I've heard these guys from Precision Planting talk about singulation and uniform emergence, and I believe in it wholeheartedly. I want all that corn to come up uniformly. Have you all done the flag test, that Precision sends you little color flags and all? If you hadn't done that, you need to do it. Because if you do cover crops, you let it get tall, sometimes you don't get that uniform emergence. So I want a plant that and I want my residue to be no taller than that. I've seen guys have great success where they plant green, and I'm not going to say it doesn't work, but I haven't seen them consistently get that emergence that I want to see. All right.

You were talking about your tissues tests on phosphorus at the... I forget what-

350.

But what number do you like to see on that? And then you were talking about the micronutrients. When are you applying all those micros?

Okay. What number do I like to see on that? You have to join Total Acre to get that number. I'm just playing. For me personally, you asked what I like to see. There is a number that's different than what the Total Acre group has come up with but, for me, I want that number to be 0.45. If it's below 0.45 it's corn. If it's above 0.45 it's real corn. That number is not the number that you need to be focused on. There is a number much lower than that that will tell you... we have, and the reason I can't share is just because of our agreement with the growers in Total Acre. There is a number of phosphorus. If it's below that number, there is zero chance of 300 bushel corn.

Wouldn't you like to have that? Say if you're a 300 bushel guy and say, "I got a chance for it," or "I have no chance." Y'all, there has not been one time in which the growers had over 300 when that phosphorus level was below this particular number. And I would love to share that with you but that's one of our NDA, proprietary things. So 0.45 is my number, but the number where y'all should be focused on is less than that.

How do you increase that?

How do you increase that number? See, now we're getting good questions. How many people put stuff in furrow? What are y'all putting in furrow? 3-18-18? I used to be that guy. Three gallons of three-18-18 on every acre. Five gallons of 3-18-18 on irrigated acres. How much is 3-18-18 a gallon? $6, $8, $10? I don't know. Mine comes from Yield Plus. What's his name? Whatever. Yield Plus in Illinois. I got a huge freight bill. I can't always ROI that, but you can make that phosphorus level go up really quick. But then what is it going to do really fast? Because all of a sudden it had all that needed. Then when it really needs it, she goes down. So I'd rather do stuff to stimulate biology to give me that phosphorus. I have zero fertilizer in my strip other than zinc in furrow.

We got humic acid, we got PGPs, and we got zinc. And we'll add some insecticide, fungicide. If I really have where we did chicken litter, we add some more, ends up zinc there. I have no phosphorus in there and my number is... actually, has anybody pulled a tissue sample at 350? Usually they're in that 0.25, 0.28, maybe 0.36. That high yield was oh 0.91. Zero phosphorus in the trench. Yeah. So that's how we're doing it. We are not doing it with fertilizer.

A little quick story: have y'all ever seen brace roots? Have you ever seen a brace root not touch the ground? Do you ever look at the end of that brace root? What's on the end of it? Like a little gel. Have you ever tasted that gel? Some of it's got a little sweet flavor. I wish I calibrated my tongue to know what is in that gel, but that gel is that root exudate. If you dig your plant and you shake it, there should be soil stuck to those roots. If there aren't, you got problems. But that gel is a plant sending out some sugars, telling the biology what it wants. If you put phosphorus in your trench, that gel is going to change. It says it got all it needs. Then when it needs it, it's not there. It's got to restart that process. So when I say, "We're talking about bugs," that's below ground. We understand corn above ground, below ground there's a lot for us to learn.

Great stuff there from Dave Hula. That's just a taste of some of the insights you can get at the Strip-Till Conference. And our early bird registration is currently underway for this year's conference, which is taking place in Iowa City July 31st through August 1st. Head to striptillconference.com for more information. Thanks for tuning into the Strip-Till Farmer podcast. Thanks to Yetter Farm Equipment for making this series possible, and I hope you have a great day. See you next time.