A few weeks ago my Dad and I finished up our first season as strip tillers and are happy with the results of year. While there were plenty of challenges, we feel that our change has not hurt the operation's productivity a bit. Our yields were very good considering the lack of rainfall as our corn was only a few bushels less than our average last year with our soybeans actually being slightly better than last season. Good soil with good organic matter paid big time this year. Anything that was lighter in texture really took it in the shorts. Not a big surprise in a drought.
So what did we learn in our first year as strippers?
1. We can grow corn on corn utilizing strip till as well as conventional tillage. In fact our side by side comparison test that I blogged about earlier this season had nearly a 27 bu/A advantage to the strip till. I don't think we will see this type of difference year in year out but the moisture conservation along with the banded nutrients had to be of benefit this year in the drought. We will have nearly 75% of our corn acres in strip tilled corn on corn next year.
2. I won't give up on a soybean crop ever again. In the middle of July I was thinking my soybeans wouldn't make 30 bu/A but a few lucky rains in August and the application of fungicide and a miticide proved to make quite a difference. I thought that my fungicide application was pretty iffy this year when I made it but our untreated test strip was nearly 7 bu/A less in a side by side comparison. A lot of folks pulled the plug on those applications this year but it was obvious that the "plant health" effects had some merit in the abscence of disease pressure.
3. Conventional corn was our best corn and convetional corn was our worst corn. Our 3 Smartstax traited hybrids were middle of the road. My observation is that I don't think it makes much difference what trait technologies you plant...if you manage them properly yield parody is fairly easy to acheive. That being said we are being defensive with the amount of rootworm beetles that were laying eggs in fields this late summer and plan to plant a mainly Smartstax hybrids next spring.
4. We have to manage our stalks different. The past 2 seasons we have cut our stalks with a chopper and have run into problems with plugging the strip till bar on a few fields by putting so much fluff on the ground. The common denominator this year appeared to be having problems on fields where we plowed last fall. The ground was so loose yet this fall that my leading coulter seemed to push in certain soil types. We need to get our cornhead to process more of the residue yet leave as much stalk as possible standing. We'll be looking at knife rolls or other trash reduction kits over the winter. My goal is getting the system to a place where combine and strip without an stalk processing operation in between.
5. You have to have patience and dedication to do this. When you are trying to do your primary tillage, dry fertilizer application and seed bed preparation in one pass guided by satelittes that need to put you at sub inch placement in the field, there are lots of variables that have to work in harmony for things to go well. One piece of the puzzle falls out and you can have a lot of frustration. There were several days when I was battling several of the pieces and it is not a fun thing to do while you watch your neighbor go back and forth with autosteer engaged reading a book at 6.5 mph pulling a ripper without stopping. At the end of the fall though it's fairly satsifying to know that my tillage is complete, my dry fertilizer is applied where my roots will be and I am ready to plant into a great seed bed with no zones of compaction across the entire field.
I'm hopeful as winter sets in I'll have more time to post on other reflections from the year or things I'm thinking about trying to improve upon for next year. Thanks for reading!
