"What are you going to do in a wet year?"

This is the question that I get the most from skeptics of strip till in my conversations with folks this winter.  Honestly "I don't know" I guess has to be my answer for now since I haven't had one.  My assumptions based off my observations made this spring the few times that it was actually wet are that I like my chances.

My favorite response to that question to a conventional tillage farmer is "What are YOU going to do in a wet year?".  

Drag a field cultivator through wet soils to dry out the top few inches and put a smear pan an inch underneath where the seed will try to grow roots?  

Have a 3 wheeled floater drive every 90 ft spread fertilizer and compact a 10 ft wide strip from it's huge tires?  

Struggle to stay a float on top of soil that has little structure or strength to support equipment since it was pulverized by a ripper or a plow last fall?

Plant directly into those angular compacted wheel track zones and then wonder why the corn that grows in those spots is a different color  and stunted the rest of the year?

My point is that all systems have flaws....it's just easier to do a certain practice when everyone else is doing it along right with you...no matter if it's the right or wrong thing to do. These are all things that we used to do personally because we thought we didn't have any other way to do it that could work. 

One of my favorite experiences learning about strip till was a talking with a grower who was doing modified ridge till/strip till 2 years ago during a very wet spring in SW Minnesota. It was one of those springs where they could not catch a break with numerous 3-4 inch rainfall events that wasn't allowing anyone to get much accomplished. He had gotten an opportunity to get into the field and start planting some soybeans before the next rainfall event moved in and was able to plant about 40 acres of the field before he got rained out again by another inch of rain. I should note that in his his system he strip/ridged the main portion of the field but ripped and field cultivated his headlands. Two days later he went back to the field to find that his stripped/ridges were starting to grey off already but where he had field cultivated and planted the headlands they were still a muddy soupy mess. He took a chance and went out planted the remainder of the field by simply planting until he'd nose the tractor into the muddy headlands and then would lift the planter up, back around on the solid undisturbed stripped/ridged ground, set the planter down on the next pass and kept planting. He told us he nearly caused a traffic jam as the neighbors couldn't believe that he was out planting and were driving by watching what he was doing. Next thing he knew his neighbors were going home to get their own field cultivators to head out and try to start working ground on their own fields and made an absolute mess and had to pull out.  They couldn't believe that the ground that hadn't been tilled was dryer than the ripped ground. It was after hearing this story that I began to feel better about my fear of a cold wet spring.

Here are some other reasons why I like my chances with strip till in a wet spring:

-I'm planting into a slightly elevated seed bed that is relatively free of residue and will warm up and dry out faster than soils that haven't been tilled.  
-The area between my strips has soil structure in place that hasn't been disturbed and will better support equipment in the spring.
-The soil in between the strips also has all the natural drainage pathways still intact from earthworms and rotting root channels from last year which will help aid drainage through the profile to tile.  
-If we do get heavy rains, the increased water infiltration from the point above will help minimize runoff and off site movement of nutrients keeping them where they belong.
-The strips I plant into will not have any zones of wheel compaction under the surface to restrict root growth.
-My fertility is placed either with the seed or directly under it in the same compaction free zone.
-Our fertilizer applied in the fall does not dictate what crop we grow if we are forced to switch from our intial crop placement plans on certain farms All those points aside, there are still things that worry me if we have a wet spring including:

-If fall strip berm heights aren't sufficient and they settle to the point where I have a depression that won't dry out. 
-Carrying so much weight on the planter tractor between starter and UAN that we create significant pinch row compaction compared to those who don't carry so much weight.
-Controlling weeds that get a significant head start on the crop before we can get in to burn them down.
-Strips washing out on hill sides
-Dealing with residue deposit piles around low spots where ponding might occur

At the end of the day, I think the benefits of the pros outweigh the potential challenges of the cons when it comes to evaluating the risks of dealing with a wet spring with our new system.  That being said...I hope for all of us in the Midwest that my rookie confidence gets challenged and it starts raining this spring!   I'd gladly trade in a little ego for some moisture at this point!!!

2012 Post Harvest Comments

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!

Strip Intercropping Results Are IN!!!

I've done a really bad job keeping this blog current over the last 2 months but we haven't had a rainy day to catch up and allow me to post anything.  There's a lot to talk about as it's been a really interesting and surprising harvest with some of the things we've evaluated this year.  I'll start off with some observations about my strip intercrop yield results which was really interesting and a lot of fun to do this year. 

I was worried that my test of intercrop strips vs conventional solid block planting would be skewed all year as the conventional block was on flat black ground and about 1/2 of my intercrop strips were on a lighter Clarion soil type that under moisture stress would have a disadvantage from not being apples to apples.  Beggers can't be choosers as I didn't have a lot of say in where I put this plot....pretty much had to beg my Dad to let me do it in the first place.  Because of this, I wanted to go out and do some pre-harvest yield estimates on the intercrop corn strips that were closest to normal solid planting block and on the same soil type.  To do this I went out and hand harvested 17.5 ft of ears 6 rows wide in the intercrop and then harvested the same from the conventional block.  What was amazing like some of the pictures earlier in the year showed was how the outside rows even at 45-50k plants/A still had torpedo ears on nearly every plant despite the drought stress we were under.  I laid out the harvested ears on a trailer so that you could see what 17.5 ft of ears looked like in the both the intercrop and conventional settings. 

Grain Cart

Strip Intercrop 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide

Conventional Planting Block 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide

I had one row #2 on my planter that wasn't dropping enough seed in both the conventional block and strip intercrop so in both cases I had a light population in that row.  Although it's not scientific, I went ahead and grandfathered in the ear counts from the opposite side of the planter on row #5 to offset this equipment variable problem when making my yield estimates for both treatments.  I estimated yield by ear weight by weighing each individual ear in each row and recording that weight.  There was little variance in the ear weights of the conventional planting block but it was really interesting in the strip intercrop block as the middle four rows all had ear weights of 7.6-8 oz where as the outside row on the east side of the strip had an average ear weight of 8.76 oz while the outside row on the west side of the strip had an average ear weight of only 7.2 oz.  This confirmed what I witnessed visually that the outside west row's ears looked smaller throughout the last half of the season most likely from the increase in temperature and winds being higher with the full exposure to the afternoon sun.  Here is the breakdown of each row's yield estimate in the intercrop strip along with final ear counts/a. 

West row 1 - 277 bu/a 45k ears
Row 2 - 246 bu/a 37 k ears
Row 3 207 bu/a 32 k ears
Row 4 227 bu/a 37k ears
Row 5 246 bu/a 37 ears
East row 6 - 360/bu/a 48k ears

Overall Intercrop Average for 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide = 261 bu/A estimate

I weighed the regular block as well but there wasn't enough variance to see anything really interesting so here's what the yield estimate was from that.

Overall Regular Planting Average for 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide = 199 bu/A estimate

Keep in mind that both treatments were corn on corn that was strip tilled last fall and freshened this spring.

So now it was pretty apparent by the estimates that we had a difference on apples to apples soils that we'd see a difference between he 2 systems.  Time to combine and see the real story. 

We combined the beans off the headlands on a Sunday afternoon and could tell right away that the yields of the beans were significantly less than what we'd been combining in our normal bean fields.  The biggest difference that I could guess why was the fact that we hadn't sprayed them with fungicide and insecticide as we had our big fields. I could see quite a bit of spider mite damage late in the season in both the corn and the soybeans so I'm guessing that was part of the reason.  Our fungicide check on one of our big fields was 6-7 bu/A better than the untreated as well so our bean yields on this field were not likely representative as to what they were if we were managing them normally. I didn't have a wagon to put the beans from the end rows available as I was in a hurry trying to beat the sun going down so I used the next best thing in the yard...my Dad's old Gleaner M2.  My Dad won't get rid of it as he says "you never know when we're going to need that thing."  I guess he was right.

Once the beans on the ends were off, I started combining the corn in the normal block of 36 rows that I planted.  I weighed each 6 row pass across the field and took the average weight of the middle 4 passes to eliminate the advantage that the outside passes would have with the increased light on the edges.  The average yield of the conventional block was 196 bu/A...not too far off from the estimate. 

I had 3, 6 row strips of intercrop corn under the high management system that were on the same soils and that I felt were relative to the same conditions that the conventional planted block had.  I harvested those 3 strips weighing each pass and then averaging them and which resulted in a avg yield of 249 bu/A.  

Here's some video of harvesting one of the 6 row intercrop strips.

So our early estimates weighing ears turned out to be pretty close to the final actual numbers.  It makes sense that they're a little less as the sampling didn't take into account the spider mite damage on the south edge of both treatments.  It was nice to see though the same relative differences held true.  So we realized a 53 bu/A advantage to our new practice in this system.  The question remains would this be economic when you do the math comparing growing continuous corn vs having 50/50 corn soybeans with intercropping as well as taking into consideration that the soybeans will likely do less than normal yields?  My answer this year is that I don't know just yet.  While raising potential corn revenues by $375/A with $7/bu corn sounds great, you have to factor in the extra cost in inputs between seed and fertilizer which I've estimated at nearly $100/A along with decreased revenue likely on the soybeans of potentially $100/A compared to what normal yields would be.  Add to this that continuous corn, if yields were decent this year, was likely $100-200/A more profitable than soybeans. 

So in the end, I have more questions than answers.  I do want to do this again on more acres in a bigger field setting and figure out a way to be able to spray and manage the soybeans like we do the rest of our acres to give them the best shot possible for yielding well.  I also want to plant the soybeans the same time I plant the corn to get as much plant growth going before they get shaded out by the corn on the outside rows.  It's quite obvious that we can grow more corn this way but it has to make economic sense across the board if we're going to adopt on a widespread basis.  I'm really glad I took the time and went through all the hassle to do this though...it really opened my eyes to what can be possible if you farm outside the box.  Thanks to those who helped me in my efforts including Sheldon Stevermer of Easton, MN and Bob Recker of Ceder Valley Consulting. 

More blogs to come quicker in the future I promise!!!

Spring Tillage Lines Still Visible in the Fall

 

All year I've been noticing how many corn and soybean fields even in a dry spring that you could see both wheel tracks and either field cultivator shovel tracks or ripper tracks from the fall before at an angle across the rows early in the season and well into summer.  There is a soybean field that I've watched this on all season long that I just got back from going out to make some observations between the tillage lines vs area in-between.  Here's a shot from about a month ago where you can see the differences in height with the straight lines from the auto steer tillage pass working from the camera vantage point towards the grove across the section. 

 

Here's a shot where you can see the tillage lines tonight with the beans turning colors.  The tillage lines are the greener beans that aren't as mature.

 



When I walked out to look at these specific spots and differences it didn't take long to see that the differences in the beans were significant beyond color variance.  The beans in the tillage line were shorter and greener and had far fewer pods on them in comparison to the soybeans in between.  Those plants were taller, more mature and had much better pod counts on them.  I took a sampling of plants from the field and took them back up to my place to take some pictures and do some pod counts.  Here's what they looked like.



Untracked on the left, beans growing in tillage track on the right

For fun I went and grabbed some of our soybeans across the road from these that were strip tilled and planted the same day as these above.  Here's a pic of our beans vs the untracked beans above.  I don't know what the variety or maturity difference is between these 2 beans but ours are much closer to combining.  A big player I think in the maturity difference is that our beans all emerged within 5 days of planting where these across the road sat in dry dirt for 2 weeks before they germinated.



Strip tilled beans on left - Untracked plants on right

I did pod counts on the 3 samples that I had gathered and found on average the green soybeans grown in the tillage track had on average 10.8 pods, the soybeans that were in between the tillage lines had 18.8 pods/plant and the strip tilled beans across the road had 28.4 pods/plant.  Granted it's a pretty small sample size and not quite scientific but still pretty interesting as it was a pretty representative of what you saw standing in the field.   

 

So what does this all mean? If this translates in yield across a 160 acre 1/4 section assuming that you have these tillage lines every 30" and that they encompass an 8" width for effecting plant growth, you have 60% of yield potential on 47 acres of that 160 acre farm.  Assuming that the untracked beans average 40 bu/A on 113 A and the others yield 24 bu/A on 47 acres.  16 less bu/A on 47 A = about 800 bushels X $17/bu  = $13,600 loss on the farm.  This is making a lot of assumptions but if the actual loss is even 1/2 of this, it's still significant.

 

So what caused this variation?  My best guess is where that the last row of shovels on the field cultivator created a dried out zone that was not leveled out completely by the drag.  This more shallow, dry, compacted zone creating a delay in emergence and prohibited root proliferation which led to these plants being further behind than those plants that grew in between.  My assumption is that there is enough mixing action on the shovels throwing dirt in the rows ahead of the back row that the seed bed is more consistent in between the last row of shovels.  Earlier in the season I thought it could possibly be the old ripper shanks from last fall went where the roots had an easier time of going down and were bigger plants because of it.  However when I saw tonight the plants growing in the lines were smaller and less productive that lessened the chances of that theory holding water. 

 

The thing that gets me is how common you can find this in corn and soybean fields across the country side if you look and what the potential loss is from this is makes a guy think.  What it reinforces with me is that creating a zone free of compaction and planting seed into it without smearing or driving something across that zone has value.  And in a dry year like this one, I'm hopeful that the moisture savings in not tilling our soil will pay dividends. 

 

We will start harvesting corn likely this week as our 98 day corn will likely be 18% or lower by the middle of the week.  All of our corn is standing well and the stalk and shank strength is surprisingly good.  Dad and I spent this weekend getting ready by setting up augers, going through the corn head, combine and hooking up the strip till rig.  I'm excited to dive in to the crop and see what things are going to yield. 

 

So far the harvesting that has happened in our area has had corn yield ranges of 140-200 bu/A which is great considering how dry we were.  Dad said he'd be thrilled if we average 150 bu/A on corn...he's always the pessimist...I think we'll be closer to 170 bu/A if I had to guess today.  The only fields that really worry me is our corn on corn plowing where moisture was short.  Soybeans I'm going to guess we'll average upper 40's to low 50's bu/A.  We'll know how accurate I am in about 10 days as we should be well into harvest by then.  Safe harvesting to all!!!



Watching the Fill

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last month.

I've been pretty disconnected from the farm over the past couple of weeks as I lost one of my very good friends and neighbor, John Larson, to a tragic crop dusting accident on July 18th.  John was great farmer and aerial applicator and his impeccable example and standards pushed me to want to do things better all the time with my own operation.   I always looked forward to comparing farming notes with him on nearly a daily basis during the growing season as there was never any BS to sift through with him.  He never made things to be more or less than what they were.  John and his brother Joe (Friesenborg & Larson) are one of the few large operations who farm big, but do it well with class and dignity.  That was evident when nearly 1000 people showed up for John's wake and roughly 600 for the funeral.  It was a good reminder to me that the value of a life well lived is worth a lot more in the end than many of the superficial things that most of us allow to consume our time and energy.  Life isn't going to be the same without him around as he was one of the good ones. I always joked with him about converting him into a strip tiller...he'd always get a shit-eating grin and look at me and say "Don't count on it Sparky!!!"  Only 38 years old and leaves behind a great family in his wife and 3 young kids.  Tough times for a lot of folks in our community dealing with this.

I've slowly gotten back to re-engaging in the farm over the last week doing a fair amount of walking of soybeans and corn.  We finally have caught some rains over the past 10 days.  Albeit light and a little late, the rain will help fill the soybean pods and hopefully add to the test weight of the corn.  We applied fungicide and insecticide to the soybeans back around the 20th of July not because we had lots of disease or bugs but to try to remove any additional stress on the beans as the tried to flower and set pods in the unrelenting heat.  At the time, the early bean pod counts were looking pretty poor but they have seemed to find away to put some more on as temps have cooled and we've gotten a little bit of rain to keep them going.  I would guess that our soybean potential assuming we catch a few more rains will be around 40-45 bu/A.

Corn has hung on amazingly well in our corner of the world similar to the beans.  I don't know how we pollinated as well as we did throughout all the heat in the middle of July but somehow we did.  Although the ear counts are not tremendous, they are better than the sub 100 bu/A horror stories we here about in Illinois and SE Iowa.  Fields are showing stress but remain fairly green and healthy looking somehow yet.  There are pockets of spider mites that are bothering some fields as well causing them to turn more than others. I've found yield ranges in the ear counts that I've done so far anywhere from 0-80 bu/A on the hills to 180-220 bu/A in the low ground.  Corn is dented for the most part and the milk line on the kernels is slowly starting to work it's way down toward physiological maturity.  The cooler temps and moisture should hopefully slow that process down so that kernel fill and test weights will be as good as possible.  Test weight is probably the biggest yield determining factor left as I don't think we're going to tip things back anymore that what we already have at this point.  I'm hopeful that our area will average somewhere between 140-165 bu/A right now.

I went out to check out the ear size in my corn on corn strip till vs plowing tonight and didn't see a lot in differences so far.  The picture below was just one check as I could find really nice ears and crappy ears on both sides of the line.  The combine will have to be the judge on this one.  The one thing that was apparent is anywhere where I had trash that wasn't cleared from the strip with the planter, ear size was definitely impacted.  Earlier in the season, you could not tell much of a difference but it was quite clear that moving the trash off the strip needs to take a higher priority for us if we're going to do much with corn on corn in 2013.


Plowing ears on left, Strip till corn on corn ears to right

 

I stopped and looked at our first planted strip tilled corn on soybean field that is straight conventional corn and it looks to be our best potential so far.  It's a good farm with productive soils and had quite a few ear counts that looked good.  The only downside is that we had a popup thunderstorm hit that farm with marble sized hail last Wednesday afternoon and strip the corn leaves up pretty good.  I think that things are far enough along that it shouldn't make too much of a difference now.

Good ears in the heavy bottom ground



Soybean stubble remaining yet between rows from this spring

 I took my daughter Avery up to our strip intercrop plot on Sunday and we had some fun teaching her about doing ear counts, spider mites, light interception and how to walk through corn and soybeans without tripping when your only 7.  She's a lot of fun to take to the field as she asks lots of great questions and takes an interest in what I'm doing.  The intercrop plot looks pretty good in places.  On the good soils where we don't have any spider mites we did some yield checks on the outside rows that came out as high as around 330 bu/A of corn with 48,000 harvestable ears/A.  It seemed like the east outside row of the 6 row strip had bigger counts than the west outside row in most of the strips which I'm assuming is because of the increased temperature stress those plants had being exposed to full sun during the heat of the afternoons.   We have a few pockets of spider mites in a few of the strips that will likely drag yields down somewhat as well.  The regular planted check block of corn  next to the strips looks to be very good as well so it will be interesting to see how things shake out when we compare things in hopefully about 5-6 weeks.  The soybeans strips in between the corn have come on better than I thought that they would've as well.  I couldn't find much for bugs in them or disease to this point.  They are rib high on me and podded fairly well.

330 bu/A strip intercrop yield check with my crop consultant

Spider mite stipling

Small ears where spider mites are





Overall, I feel extremely fortunate that we will have the opportunity to harvest a very average crop to what we have been used to the last few years.  A few weeks ago I was worried that we wouldn't get anything and that I wouldn't be able to fill my forward contracts.  There are many folks in the cornbelt that would be envious of the position we are in here in north central Iowa.  We're not going to have a bin buster, but we'll have something to at least put in the bin.   Given all that's happened in the last month in my life, I'm trying to focus more on the positive than the negative.  Here's to cool temps, slow rains, and test weight for all!!!

One week til the party's over

That's my guess as to how much time we have left before significant damage starts to occur to our crops from the drought.  We watched 3 times yesterday afternoon and last night thunderstorms approach Winnebago county and then split apart and go around.  I'm happy for the folks up along Interstate 90 and over west of Algona that were able to pick up rains.  For the rest of us the next few days don't look too promising with highs near 100 again.  The only thing this rain gauge has had accumulate in it in the last 3 weeks as you can see is some runny bird shit.  At least it's getting used by someone!

Despite how dry it is, the crop still looks very good driving by on the road.  Our soybeans are a lush, dark green and other than a few hill tops pulling back, look great.  We have a few weeds coming through the herbicide applications that we made about a month ago but overall control was very good.  We plan to go out in the next week or two and walk some beans to get rid of the waterhemp and velvetleaf that are left.  Soybeans are in the R2 to nearing R3 stage which means they are starting to set pods on the bottom part of the plant.  Our plan is to spray fungicide and insecticide likely next weekend or early next week for our last trip across the beans.  If it doesn't rain or doesn't look like it will rain, we may reconsider. 

Last weekend I went out scouting and found a lot of rootworm beetles in one of our conventional fields feeding on the silks of the corn plants.  There was some actual silk clipping going on which can impede proper pollination so we had our local aerial applicator come fly on some insecticide to knock down the rootworms.  I scouted our other farms and didn't think the pressure they had warranted a trip so we've let them go.  Our early planted corn is all pollinated and the late planted corn that went in the 10th of May is starting to pollinate now which may be a bad thing with the 100 degree heat forecast for the next few days.  It will be interesting to go out and look at how successful the pollination was over the last 10 days later this week.  From what I looked at this week, it looked like most ears had pollinated 30 kernels out of 40 potential long by 16 rows around.  If those can hang on and not abort, that would equate to 170 bu corn assuming a final stand of 32,000 harvestable ears and that we got moisture to fill the grain out.  If we could get 170 bu/A corn, it would be a miracle looking at the current forecast.  My guess is that things will be closer to under 140 bu/A for our area without rains.  I read somewhere this week it takes 9" of soil moisture to fill a corn crop from silking to black layer.  We're about out of soil moisture now so we're going to need some big rains in August to hold on to the pollinated potential we have now. 

I went back again to our plowing vs strip till corn on corn line this last week and looked for differences and saw them again.  The strip till appears to have tasseled about 2-3 days sooner and is much more even in tassel emergence than where our plowed ground is.  It will be interesting with the drought stress to see how this comparison plays out for the rest of the season.  I hope that our strips will provide an advantage but am not holding my breath.  If it doesn't rain, no practice will make a difference.

I really hope we can luck out and catch a shower on Wednesday when the next frontal boundary comes through and that this pattern changes.  If not, I'm going to offset my potential losses by investing heavily in the local liquor store as I think their business could be booming over the next few months.  It's do or die time. 



July 1st, 2012-Two from Tassel

It's hot and getting hotter and drier by the hour.  The forecast doesn't sound that promising this week either with  only a slight chance of rain coming tonight.  Hard to believe that 10 days ago we got 2-3 inches of rain and we're already bone dry again.  I just got back from scouting crops and doing some digging and the profile has very little moisture left in the top 8 inches.  If we don't get rain this week with the high temperatures forecasted, I'm afraid we'll start to see issues with pollination that will take place over the next 2 weeks. 

Our corn planted on April 25th is at V14 and has 2 leaves to emerge before the tassel is out.  Typically it takes about 3 days in temperatures like this for a new leaf to emerge so we will likely have tassels out by next Sunday to take pics of.  Hopefully there are silks out at the same time.  One of the problems with drought stress around pollination is the uneven emergence of silks matching up with pollen shed.  If  the 2 don't allign, you can have big problems.  Despite the heat, the corn looks phenomenal so far.  Green from top to bottom and very few signs of disease or nutrient deficiencies.  I did find one plant last week that may have had the start of Goss's Wilt developing on the farm that suffered so much wind damage earlier.  Not much of a surprise. 

The good news is that after digging a few corn root masses, it looks like we have very little rootworm pressure on our conventional corn and a very dense fibrous root system established in the zones.  I'd venture to say we have more fine root hairs than what I'm used to seeing from our conventional tillage days.  We still have some soybean residue left between the rows in our first year corn but much of it is gone.  I don't know how much of an advantage we have from a moisture preservation standpoint.  When I dig in the strip, the ground comes up very easily and seperates well.  When I dig between the rows where no tillage has been done it's a different story...big hard chunks of compacted soil.  Seeing how compacted the soil is in between the rows in both our corn and soybeans has got me re-thinking my approach to not doing any tillage besides my fall stripping...especially with our corn stalk residue.  When soils are that compacted between the rows, oxygen becomes depleted and residue breakdown is slowed to a crawl.  If we don't break the residue down well over the summer months, we will have more residue to contend with next fall and next spring going back to corn. I've been visiting with my friend Sheldon Stevermer about this over the last week and we've been kicking around some ideas in how to possibly address this without doing too much damage to the soil structure we're trying to establish and maintain.  Over time in the strip till system, the compacted layers should be marginalized by the increased soil life and biology that promotes natural aereation and porosity.  It's obvious by this video we have  a few years to go before we're there.

Residue mat holding moisture

Compacted soil between the rows

Loose soil under the zone

Our soybeans are the biggest that they've ever been going into the fourth of July holiday but it seems that they are lagging behind the neighbors that are using conventional tillage.  They look uniform and even but just not as bushy and impressive as fields that were tilled.  I'm thinking that there are several reasons for why we're seeing these differences:

1.  Lack of oxygen in the soil system from less tillage and compacted soil between the rows
2.  Root masses running into high salt load from my aggressive fertilizer program last fall
3.  Poor varietal placement on my part on one field

I will say after walking and doing some digging last night that the mat of cornstalk residue is definately retaining more moisture than tilled fields I've dug in.  I was able to find enough moisture to ball up soil underneath the mat which was encouraging.  Hopefully this translates into an advantage if things stay dry.  Weed control is fantastic with the exception of some volunteer corn that clumps that may come back with any moisture we receive.  I can find no waterhemp to speak of emerging after our post-emerge treatments completed a week ago. 

Overall, our crops have never looked so good before the 4th of July.  This isn't a function of strip till as everyone's crops in my area look the best they ever have in my opinion despite the tillage system.  This is however probably the most scared I've been about the amount of potential that could be lost if we don't get a rain in the next 10 days.  We will go from 250 bu/A corn potential to 150 bu/A or less pretty quick if things stay dry through July.  With new crop corn at $6/bu, that's a huge revenue swing in the balance.  I feel fortunate though as we still have a chance while others in Illinois, Indiana and the SE cornbelt are already toasted and discing corn under.  When you dig and see how dry our soils are right now, we're not that far away from the same issues. 

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.  Enjoy the 4th holiday!