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sw MN | Here are my reasons for not being interested in strip till
1 We spread cattle feed lot manure that has to be incoproated into the soil with tillage. There is no way around it.
2 I am located in sw MN in the area of cold, wet, sticky spring conditions with many cloudy days. The ground would stay wet during some springs into June without fall tillage. Corn stalk ground is really bad for this. This is what Chad is refered to. This could be a huge yield hit. We need black soil showing to warm up and dry out the ground.
3 Strip Till machines are expense and require a even more expense dry cart. I have a hard time seeing the $ saved this way for me.
4 I am planting a lot of corn on corn which only seems to yield well with the use of the mini moldboard plow here. All other ways of doing it seem to result in yellow, uneven, slow to take off, higher moist, easily drought stessed and lower yielding corn. I will sit back and watch someone else try to make strip till work for corn on corn here. I will stick to what works. The risk of 50 bpa yield hit isn't worth it to me. My corn on corn is my best corn this year and we had .2 in of rain from June 29 - Aug1 During a wet spring it would get too late to plant corn before the soil would dry out.
4 I think that strip till requires RTK to work correctly. I wouldn't try it without guidance. This just adds to the expense. It might be different if your best operater is strip tilling but he is combining or planting at the time.
5 Many of the strip till machines do not allow for the injecting of NH3. This means using a higher priced N source. 10-15 cents/ unit adds to the expense very fast. That savings in fuel and fert is going very away fast.
6 No way to incorproated soil applied chems for corn.
7 Here beans need to be planted in narrow rows for max yield. 15 in rows is out Lower yielding beans is another expense. (M) has the 10+ years of yield to back that up.
8 What is going to keep the crazy spring winds we have here from covering up the strips with residue and making them cold and wet?
I know Jim preaches about the savings but I don't see it here in sw MN but I am not selling a strip till rig either. I am going to watch and learn for now. I will spend my time working on raising higher yields and doing a better job of marketing. Maybe it will turn out like no till beans here. Back in the early 90s many tried no till beans and they all went back to fall tillage after few years disapointment and very late planting. Good Luck Guys Every farm is different, this is what works here and may not work for you. I might demo a Turbo Till if I can but most likely I will just try to use smaller FC sweeps to leave uncampacted strips for the roots and water to move down though and make that work for a lot less $$.
Edited by JDPlowboy 8/12/2006 18:13
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vertical tillage and equipment
